sent their surplus down the Missouri River to St. Louis, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Cotton was exported to Britain, or shipped north to textile mills in New York and New England. In Howard County, developed along the river for plantations, planters named their large estates in the Southern style, such as Greenwood, Redstone, Oakwood and Sylvan Villa. On these plantations, slave populations ranged between 15 and 70 people; they cultivated acreage of 500 acres (2 km²) to 2000 acres (8 km²), or more. Postwar history After the Civil War, the slaves were emancipated. The Reconstruction-era legislature established free public education for all citizens for the first time. While whites insisted that schools be segregated, the legislature required that all townships with 20 or more black children of student age had to establish schools. By 1870, of the former slave states, Missouri had the "largest proportion of schools for negro children." Black communities rapidly established independent churches and schools to express their own culture and create a sphere outside white supervision. In Little Dixie in the early 20th century, of the counties with the largest black populations, Callaway County at one time had twenty-eight African American schools; Boone, eighteen; Howard, sixteen; Cooper, twenty-six; Chariton, fourteen; Lafayette, twenty; Saline, eighteen. Although the number of schools decreased as rural black communities dissolved with the onslaught of the Depression and the economic opportunity of the New Deal, in 1933 these same counties still had the highest number of black schools outside of St. Louis and the Bootheel. In keeping with competition and fears among whites, they exercised a higher frequency of mob violence against blacks and lynchings of African Americans in this region than in other parts of the state. The pattern appears to be strongly associated with the history of slavery, the rural economy after the war, and white efforts to establish dominance in resulting race relations. In the late 19th-century white Democrats throughout the South sought to reimpose and maintain white supremacy. Between 1889 and 1919, a period that is considered the "nadir of racial relations" in the United States, Southern states disenfranchised most blacks through new constitutions and amendments. Lynchings of black men were numerous in the South in this period. In 1890 in the traditional seven counties of Little Dixie, the black population totaled 45,000. It increased into the early 20th century. In the "nadir" period, there