The Memphis Cotton Museum occupies the old Cotton Exchange building on Front Street — the place where, from 1874 to the mid-twentieth century, cotton traders gathered to buy and sell the crop that made Memphis one of the wealthiest cities in America. The original trading floor is preserved, with the ticker tape machines and the boards where prices were posted still in place. At its peak, more cotton passed through Memphis than anywhere else in the world.
The exhibits trace the complete history of cotton in the Mid-South: from the plantation system and the enslaved labor that produced the wealth, through the mechanization of picking and the decline of the Delta economy, to the present. It is one of the more honest and complete treatments of slavery's economic legacy that you will find in a southern museum. The building itself is worth seeing — the trading floor has a particular grandeur that makes the scale of the commercial enterprise tangible.