OSCAR E. BLEDSOE, JR.

OSCAR E. BLEDSOE, JR. was born September 7,1878. He was 43 years old when he changed forever the way in which United States grown cotton was marketed.

Oscar E. Bledsoe, Jr.

"He was a forward looking man and a long-range thinker," said Aven Whittington of Greenwood, who served as Staplcotn's Board chairman from 1986 to 1992.

During the summers, a report on the crop was always published in Staple Cotton Review, the Association's first membership publication. "It was really a report on Mr. Bledsoe's crop in detail," Whittington says. "Boll counts. Insect situation. He was very thorough, all the way through. In a whole lot of the articles, he was reporting his own experience. He had his managers do boll counts and everything to give a report of the crop," he recalls.

Whittington remembers the day Bledsoe stormed into Will Garrard's office and said "Will, you can't afford to die. If you die, do you see what this Congress has done with these inheritance taxes?"

"Mr. Bledsoe was a successful planter and very, very conservative,' recalls longtime Staplcotn director LeRoy P. Percy of Greenville. Percy was also a founder and director of Mississippi Chemical Corporation and remembers in the late 1940s when its organizers were selling stock in what would become America's first farmer-owned fertilizer producer.

"We were selling stock and Mr. Bledsoe told everybody, 'Don't buy that stock. Those people will never make a pound of fertilizer.' Mr. Bledsoe didn't t want to try anything new. I'm surprised he agreed to be chairman of something as radical and different as Staplcotn,' Percy said.

Oscar Bledsoe's sense of humor was evident in the names of the two plantations he operated north of Greenwood. One was called "lbedam", and the other was "Ubedam"

Bledsoe had one son who died young and childless and an older daughter who never married.

Katharine, his younger daughter, married Ed Jones, whose family had extensive farming interests in Leflore County in the 1920s. Ed and Katharine's son was christened Ed Jones, Jr. Since Bledsoe had no surviving male heirs to carry on the family name, he convinced them to change his grandsons name to Ed Jones Bledsoe. Ed Jones Bledsoe farms the Bledsoe family property at Shellmound today.

When Bledsoe died February 5,1954, Staplcotn's Board characterized Oscar Bledsoe as "a pioneer in cooperative marketing. Largely through his untiring efforts we have the Staple Cotton Cooperative Association and the Staple Cotton Discount Corporation. Under his able leadership, both organizations have ranked foremost in their respective fields, having served the large part of the Delta of Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana for more than thirty years. The history and success of this venture were ever, and justly so, a source of pride and satisfaction to Mr. Bledsoe, for which he always gave due credit to his able associates.

"He was endowed with a keen intellect and was a close student of social, economic and government affairs. He was a successful planter, and much of his time was devoted to the problems of agriculture. He possessed unusual ability in the field of finance. He was a man of decided convictions and was intolerant of what he believed to be wrong or unfair. He was always fair and considerate and his fellow officers and all employees held him in affectionate regard and esteem. The Delta and the whole state of Mississippi will long feel the imprint of his personality and able leadership," the Board concluded.