Now, the 35 miles of Highway 61 between Memphis and Tunica are lined with hundreds of billboards touting the riverside casinos. 'It was dead,' said Angela Jones, who got her first full-time job in a casino, making change for $7 an hour.

It was run by a handful of better-off whites, who owned the businesses and farms, but was populated by poor rural blacks, the grandchildren of sharecroppers.

More than $1 billion in building permits has been granted in the past two years.īefore the casinos came, Tunica was the textbook image of a rural backwater, a remnant of the Old South. But are things better? Hell, yes.'Ĭalled 'the most southern place' on Earth, the poor but folkloric Mississippi Delta - the departure point for the great migration of southern blacks to northern cities and the birthplace of the blues - is becoming the new Vegas on the Mississippi. 'How has gambling changed Tunica?' said Paul Battle, a wealthy cotton planter and catfish farmer who has chaired the county board of supervisors for the past 33 years. Where two years ago a dirt road once disappeared over a levee along the Mississippi River, Johnny Cash is now playing to a packed house at Sam's Town Hotel and Gambling Hall, the Old West look-alike. It is a giddy and disorienting phenomenon - for visitors and residents alike. Mississippi now has more square feet of gaming space than Atlantic City. A short drive from the old sharecropper shacks in a county once deemed America's poorest, there rises above the fallow cotton fields an Irish castle, along with a Spanish galleon and an Old West town - just three of 10 casinos erected here over the past two years.Īlmost overnight, Tunica County, a place populated largely by field hands, welfare mothers and children, has been transformed into one of the hottest casino gambling destinations in the country.

List of tunica casinos