Mississippi blues master Charley Patton was born on this property when it was known as Herring's Place, according to Bolton bluesman Sam Chatmon, though Patton's birthdate remains disputed, with sources citing 1881, 1885, 1887, and April 1891. During his lifetime Patton was the most important recording artist, creative musician, and crowd-pleasing entertainer in Mississippi blues, developing his style in the Delta while drawing earlier inspiration from musicians around Bolton, Edwards, and Raymond and absorbing a pre-blues repertoire still evident in the songs he began recording in 1929. His body of recorded work from 1929 to 1934 remains unparalleled, and his live performances were reportedly even more awe-inspiring; he died on April 29, 1934. Researchers and scholars have long debated details of his life, death, music, name spelling, and birthplace, but the Herring farm along the road named for Samuel Lycurgus "Sam" Herring has become widely accepted as his birthplace, based largely on the account of Sam Chatmon, who knew Patton from an early age. Chatmon recalled the Herring place as a farm with cotton and corn crops, horse races, mechanical rocking horses, a commissary, a jukehouse for gambling and dancing, and a resident guitarist, Lem Nichols, whom Patton may have heard, while Henry Sloan was the musician most often cited for shaping Patton's development. By Chatmon's account, Patton lived there in the 1890s with his mother Annie and two sisters apart from her husband Bill; by the 1900 census the family lived west of Bolton near Sloan, by 1902 they had moved to Will Dockery's plantation in Sunflower County, and by 1910 Patton was purportedly already the Delta's leading figure in the emerging musical form that came to be called the blues.
