A Greenwood business partnership plans to turn farmland along the Tallahatchie River off Money Road into a resort for blues enthusiasts, duck hunters and people who just want to get away.
"We have a group of people who are going to establish a business on the site," Billy Whittington, one of the partners in Three Forks LLC, said Monday. "The business intends to move and refurbish for rent a number of tenant-style farm houses and a commissary-style building."
Whittington spoke in a request to the Leflore County Board of Supervisors to rezone three acres of his plantation for the project. The board voted to set a Nov. 24 public hearing for the zoning variance.
The venture is inspired by the Shack-Up Inn at Hopson Plantation outside Clarksdale. The inn includes shotgun-style houses for tourists and music workshops and a commissary-turned-music-joint.
"We owe them a special thanks for helping us so much in understanding their project and how our project ought to be done," Whittington said.
But the interest in preserving the artifacts of plantation history goes beyond the Shack-Up Inn's influence.
Blues historian Steve LaVere, another Three Forks partner along with Stuart Fincher and Whittington's wife, Aubrey, entered the project as a way to further memorialize the blues as music historically rooted in a similar environment.
And Whittington said his wife has always been a lover of memorabilia. A house on the Whittington plantation has been dubbed "Aubrey's house" because she refuses to let it go even though it stays in the way of her husband's farming operation, Whittington said.
"She just loves to preserve all sorts of things," he said. "She spent a couple of weeks driving around the Delta and talking to different landowners to see if she could get them to either sell or donate any still-usable tenant houses they had, and she had reasonable success."
