David Oshinsky, author of "Worse Than Slavery", said that in the early 20th century Parchman, from the outside, "looked like a typical Delta plantation, with cattle barns, vegetable gardens, mules dotting the landscape, and cotton rows stretching for miles." Alan Lomax, a folklorist, wrote in "The Land Where Blues Began" that "Only a few strands of barbed wire marked the boundary between the Parchman State Penitentiary and the so-called free world. Yet every Delta black knew he could easily find himself on the wrong side of that fence." Camp One became the administrative and commercial center of Parchman. It was located near the main gate, the railroad depot, and the main road. William B. Taylor and Tyler H. Fletcher, authors of "Profits from convict labor: Reality or myth observations in Mississippi: 1907–1934", said that Camp One, by 1917, appeared like "a little city." Camp One housed the residences of the superintendent and the superintendent's staff, the residences of the camp sergeant and the two assistants of the sergeant, a hospital, a gin, a church, a post office, and a visitor's building. The facility, known as the "front camp", also housed an administration building and an infirmary described by Oshinsky as "crude." Newly arriving prisoners were processed at the administration building, and they received their prison uniforms there. Taylor and Fletcher said that the other camps "amounted to little more than wooden barracks surrounded by cultivated land." Within Parchman, the camps other than Camp One shared of land.