Natchez

Natchez is the oldest European settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley and dates its founding to the French settlement at Fort Rosalie in 1716. Drawings and descriptions by French engineer Dumont de Montigny document the settlement’s buildings and two French plantations.

In 1763, Natchez became part of British West Florida, leading to an influx of Anglo-American settlers. In 1779, Natchez came under Spanish control during which Natchez’s grid plan was laid out c. 1790. Fewer than ten extant buildings date to the Spanish period, and most have been enlarged and remodeled. Mount Locust (ND65), Airlie (1793; 9 Elm Street), and King’s Tavern (ND41) are the most authentic expressions of this era.

After Natchez became part of the Mississippi Territory in 1798 and steamboats began operating on the Mississippi River in 1811, the city’s wealth exploded over the next five decades. Nowhere in the antebellum South was an economy based on cotton and African enslavement more successful. Shipping their product to the textile mills of Great Britain and New England, Natchez-based planters expanded their cotton empire across the river to Louisiana and Texas and to far-flung plantations upriver in the Mississippi Delta. They also diversified by investing in railroads, banks, and real estate, all largely centered in the North. These cultural and business ties to the North and Europe made Natchez a center of Unionist sentiment throughout the Civil War.

In 1860, enslaved people made up about 30 percent of the 6,612 population in the town proper, and Natchez had the state’s largest population of free African Americans, many of whom were skilled artisans. Natchez was occupied by Union troops in July 1863 but suffered little damage. New construction immediately after the war was largely commercial and reflected the shift from a planter economy to a merchant economy, fueled by the influx of hundreds of newly freed African Americans. During the late nineteenth century, many antebellum suburban estates were subdivided to create residential lots, and new houses were less regional and more national in plan and style. The city’s Queen Anne and Colonial Revival buildings testify to a renewed cotton economy in the late nineteenth century, but the boll weevil’s devastation of the region’s cotton crop after 1907 created an economic depression that continued through the 1930s. With developers and businesses unable to build grand new buildings, the women of the community focused instead on preserving the buildings of the past.

In 1932, the Natchez Garden Club initiated the nation’s second oldest (the oldest is in Virginia) historic house tour, the Natchez Pilgrimage. Books and movies that romanticized the Old South also promoted tourism, which experienced a boost from the construction of the Natchez Trace Parkway (see Natchez Trace, p. 171), opened in 1939. In 1951, the city enacted one of the nation’s first preservation ordinances. Today, tourism is the city’s most important industry, and Natchez benefits from the coordinated preservation activities of the Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez Garden Club, Pilgrimage Garden Club, Daughters of the American Revolution, City of Natchez, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and Natchez National Historical Park, all of which own and maintain significant historic properties. Their efforts have made Natchez one of America’s most significant historic cities with nationally important buildings and sites.