The World Champion Hopkins County Stew contest was started by Rod Henderson (now deceased), who was active in the Hopkins County Chamber of Commerce for a number of years and was later named Manager of the Hopkins County Regional Civic Center.

The year was 1970 and there were 12 cooking teams in that first contest. This year we expect over 130 cooking teams to enter. Hopkins County Stew, however, goes waaaaaay back to the 19^th century---We only made it a contest in 1970. There are several theories of how Hopkins County Stew got started, but the most popular one was that it began with school "closings". In the Fall of the year, each year, county schools (at one time there were over 100 schools in Hopkins County) would close at cotton picking time, for a period of about six weeks, so the students could join their families in harvesting the cotton crop. Dairying replaced cotton as the main agricultural enterprise in the mid-1930's and remains strong today, along with equine, beef and forage crop farming. Anyway, the last day of school, families from across the district would gather at the school and cook a noon meal (a stew) in a cast iron pot and everyone would bring whatever ingredients they had to put in the stew. Most of the meat at that time was probably squirrel. (Note): Hopkins County Stew is akin to what is commonly referred to as "Irish Stew" and may be an offshoot of that brought to this country by early Irish immigrants.