Among the first of the Hudson Berry family to move to Mississippi were Sarah Hiott Berry and her husband, John Harlen Machen, and their small children. She was a daughter of Reverend Nathan Berry and therefore a granddaughter of Hudson Berry. They settled in a community called Salem in Tippah County, Mississippi, in what is now Benton County. It was about four miles from Ashland, the present county seat of Benton
County. The first land purchased by them was on December 25, 1840; and on December 10, 1840, she and her brothers and sisters sold their interest in the Hudson Berry home plantation, the cotton factory, the saw mill to their uncle, Micajah Berry. Doubtless the proceeds of this sale were used to buy this Mississippi land. While they were in South Carolina in 1840 disposing of their interest in the Nathan Berry estate and the Hudson Berry estate, they told all their relatives about the opportunities and about the fertile soil in the northern section of Mississippi.
This new land seemed to offer a solution to the problem then confronting the second generation of the Hudson Berry and the William Halbert families as well as the second generation of other planters in the Piedmont Section of South Carolina.