Walter Sillers, Sr.

Walter Sillers Sr. (March 2, 1852 – January 3, 1931) was an American lawyer, politician, businessman, and planter in Mississippi. He played a significant role in the economic, agricultural, and political culture of the Mississippi Delta region. A cotton planter, he was an advocate for the establishment of crop control policies for the Southern United States through the development of planter's cooperatives. He was a key figure in the Mississippi Democratic Party and was responsible for the construction of levees in the Mississippi River Valley.

Early life Sillers was born on March 2, 1852, in Jefferson County, Mississippi. He was the son of Joseph Sillers, a planter and Confederate soldier who was captured by Union forces during the Siege of Vicksburg, and Matilda Clark, sister of Mississippi Governor Charles Clark. He grew up on one of his family's plantations in Bolivar County, where he moved in 1854.

Sillers ran multiple cotton plantations, labored by African-American tenant workers after Emancipation, that he had inherited from his family. He owned a law office and Rosedale's bank. He was a charter member of the Staple Cotton Cooperative Association of Greenwood, one of the first co-ops to be established in the region. He began his interest in the development of levees on his family's plantation at Lake Beulah, where he worked as a levee guard during the flood seasons. He remarried seventeen-year-old Florence Carson Warfield in April 1887. They had had six children; Anna Farrar Sillers, Mary Sillers Skinner, Florence Sillers Ogden, Walter Sillers Jr., Evelyn Sillers Pearson, and Lillian Burrill Sillers Holleman. Sillers built a large mansion on Levee Street in Rosedale in 1889.