Missouri Bootheel

The Missouri Bootheel is the southeasternmost part of the state of Missouri, extending south of 36°30’ north latitude, so called because its shape in relation to the rest of the state resembles the heel of a boot. Strictly speaking, it is composed of the counties of Dunklin, New Madrid, and Pemiscot. However, the term is locally used to refer to the entire southeastern lowlands of Missouri located within the Mississippi Embayment, which includes parts of Butler, Mississippi, Ripley, Scott, Stoddard and extreme southern portions of Cape Girardeau and Bollinger counties. The largest city in the region is Kennett.

The Bootheel and the Oklahoma-Kansas-Missouri border near the 37th parallel north form the two biggest jogs in a nearly straight line of state borders that starts on the Atlantic Ocean with the Virginia–North Carolina border and extends to the tristate border of Nevada, Arizona and Utah.

Until the 1920s the district was a wheat-growing area of family farms. Following the invasion of the boll weevil, which ruined the cotton crop in Arkansas, planters moved in. They bought up the land for conversion to cotton commodity crops, bringing along thousands of sharecroppers. After mechanization of agriculture and other changes in the 1930s, many blacks left the area to go North in the Great Migration. These counties have predominantly white populations in the 21st century, although a few have significant minorities of African Americans.

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