In 1716, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, governor of the French colony of Louisiana, ordered the construction of Fort Rosalie (ND16) at Natchez on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, the first permanent European settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley. In 1722, Bienville established nine administrative districts in Louisiana, one of which was the Natchez District, encompassing much of southwest Mississippi. The Natchez Indians, who initially were hospitable, revolted in 1729 against French aggression, killing over two hundred settlers and burning Fort Rosalie and other French settlements. The French retaliated and, by 1731, destroyed the Natchez as a nation.
In 1763, Britain defeated France in the French and Indian War, and the Natchez District became part of British West Florida. The British offer of liberal land grants encouraged an influx of Anglo-Americans, and they became the dominant and lasting influence on the region’s culture and architectural character. Settlers traveled down the Mississippi River and along the Natchez Trace, a road that led from Nashville to Natchez.
Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795 established the Natchez District as U.S. territory, and in 1798, the U.S. Congress created the Mississippi Territory which also encompassed most of Alabama. Natchez served as the territorial capital until 1802, when the legislature moved to the fledgling town of Washington six miles inland. By 1809, the territorial government had divided the Natchez District into seven counties: Adams, Amite, Claiborne, Franklin, Jefferson, Wilkinson, and Warren.
The architecture of the Natchez District in the eighteenth century reflected utilitarian rather than aesthetic considerations. The French largely built simple post-in-the-ground ( poteau-en-terre) buildings, and the English built plain buildings of log or heavy timber framing. In the nineteenth century, architectural scale and sophistication reflected the region’s expanding cotton economy. That economy, although devastated by the Civil War, experienced a resurgence in the late nineteenth century due largely to the railroad, as evidenced by many buildings in newly fashionable architectural styles. But this prosperity ended when the boll weevil began to ravage the region’s cotton fields in 1907.
Today, the Natchez District’s counties are among the most rural in the state and have become reforested. However, they contain the state’s most significant historic buildings from the colonial, territorial, and antebellum periods. Plantation houses, dependency buildings, and churches dot the region’s undulating terrain, and Church Hill in Jefferson County is the state’s foremost rural plantation community. Thus, it is not surprising that Mississippi’s preservation movement began in Natchez and that heritage tourism is today one of the region’s major economic drivers.
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