Drew, MS

Drew is a Sunflower County city on US 49W in the northern Mississippi Delta, between Jackson and Clarksdale. Its name came from Miss Drew Daniel, daughter of Andrew Jackson Daniel, after the Yellow Dog Railroad extended through the area and the post office moved from Promised Land Plantation. That railroad arrival put Drew into the cotton economy; the area once had more cotton gins than any other locality in the country. The gin count fell to one by 2008, but cotton fields, plantations, and the broad Delta road network still set the horizon.

Drew's current civic map includes the Sunflower County Consolidated School District and Mississippi Delta Community College's Drew Center. The city's history also carries hard truths: Joe Pullen was lynched here in 1923, and Emmett Till was murdered in the surrounding Delta in 1955. Those events belong to Drew's local memory alongside the railroad, agricultural work, and Black community life that shaped the city. Drew is a place where the Yellow Dog line, the cotton gin, the college center, and the history of racial violence all meet on the same flat stretch of Sunflower County.