Marianna → Helena

What it is now

Helena and West Helena merged into one city in 2006 and kept both names. The town was platted in 1833 and named for the daughter of an early settler. It sits where Crowley's Ridge meets the Mississippi, the only high ground on the river between Memphis and Vicksburg.

Helena Harbor works four thousand acres of flood-protected industrial land around a slackwater harbor at river mile 652, sixty-five miles below Memphis, with seven miles of its own rail and a channel into roughly fifteen thousand miles of inland waterway. Envirotech Chemical Services and Helm Fertilizer operate there, rail service came back in 2016, and there is a new water tower going up, the county's first since the 1980s.

The country behind it grows cotton, soybeans and rice.

Eat and drink

• The festival is dinner — The food on Cherry Street and Phillips Street is where to spend the evening.
• Delta Que & Brew, 233 Cherry St — They bring lunch out to Storm Creek for you at eleven.
• Delta hot tamales — A real Helena thing, and the reason is better than the recipe. Peter St. Columbia came up the river from Sicily in 1892 selling dry goods, and Sicilian and Mexican field hands could understand enough of each other's languages to trade a tamale recipe across. His family sold them here for forty years, and his grandson Joe brought the business back in 1987. Pasquale's usually works the festivals.

If you have an hour

• The Delta Cultural Center, 141 Cherry St — Open Thursday nine to five. Admission is free.
• The levee above Cherry Street — Interpretive panels cover the Battle of Helena and Trail of Tears passage through here, and it has the best look at the river you will get all week.
• Court Square Park — A few blocks off Cherry. It holds the Elaine Massacre Memorial, a statue honoring the students of Southland College, the first institution of higher education for African Americans west of the Mississippi, and Harmony Park.

Visit Helena →King Biscuit Blues Festival →Delta Cultural Center →