Day 13, Natchez, September 29, 2022

 Day 13, Natchez, September 29, 2022

Natchez may be the oldest city on the Mississippi but we also have the brightest future! Natchez is a walkable, vibrant, and beautiful historic city, where preservation and progress go hand in hand. Today's Natchez is affordable, livable, and especially attractive to those with an entrepreneurial spirit. We enjoy our reputation as a friendly, welcoming town that offers inclusion and community, where “Y’all means all!” 

High on the bluffs overlooking the majestic Mississippi River, the beautiful city of Natchez is a unique, and seamless blend of old and new. With over three centuries of fascinating history, Natchez has an extraordinary collection of historic buildings, homes and churches, meticulously-maintained antebellum mansions, four National Park sites, ancient Indian mounds, and the exquisite Natchez Trace Parkway. This jewel of the Mississippi also offers visitors the attractions of a desirable small town destination –a beautiful, walkable downtown, magnificent sunsets, delicious cuisine, a vibrant art and music scene, outdoor adventures, exciting nightlife, and events all year long; all served up with genuine Southern hospitality.

Steamboat Natchez

Natchez is the county seat and only city of Adams County, Mississippi.  Natchez has a total population of 15,792 (as of the 2010 census).  Located on the Mississippi River across from Vidalia in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, Natchez was a prominent city in the antebellum years, a center of cotton planters and Mississippi River trade.

Natchez is some 90 miles southwest of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, which is located near the center of the state.  It is approximately 85 miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, located on the lower Mississippi River.  Natchez is the 25th-largest city in the state.  The city was named for the Natchez tribe of Native Americans, who with their ancestors, inhabited much of the area from the 8th century AD through the French colonial period.

Established by French colonists in 1716, Natchez is one of the oldest and most important European settlements in the lower Mississippi River Valley.  After the French lost the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War), they ceded Natchez and near territory to Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris of 1763 (it later traded other territory east of the Mississippi River with Great Britain, which expanded what it called West Florida).  The British Crown bestowed land grants in this territory to officers who had served with distinction in the war. These officers came mostly from the colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They established plantations and brought their upper class style of living to the area.

Beginning 1779, the area was under Spanish colonial rule.  After defeat in the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain ceded the territory to the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1783).  Spain was not a party to the treaty, and it was their forces who had taken Natchez from British troops. Although Spain had been allied with the American colonists, they were more interested in advancing their power at the expense of Britain.  Once the war was over, they were not inclined to give up that which they had acquired by force.

In 1797 Major Andrew Ellicott of the United States marched to the highest ridge in the young town of Natchez, set up camp, and raised the first American Flag claiming Natchez and all former Spanish lands east of the Mississippi above the 31st parallel for the United States.

After the United States acquired this area from the Spanish, the city served as the capital of the Mississippi Territory and then of the state of Mississippi.  It predates Jackson by more than a century; the latter replaced Natchez as the capital in 1822, as it was more centrally located in the developing state.  The strategic location of Natchez, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, ensured that it would be a pivotal center of trade, commerce, and the interchange of ethnic Native American, European, and African cultures in the region; it held this position for two centuries after its founding.

Additional info:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez,_Mississippi

Looking down river at twin bridges of US 425

Our river boat

St. Mary Basilica, formerly St. Mary's Cathedral, located in Natchez, Mississippi, is a parish church in the Diocese of Jackson and Minor basilica of the Catholic Church.  In 1979 it was listed under its former name as a contributing property in the Natchez On-Top-of-the-Hill Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.  The Basilica was dedicated to Mary, under the title Our Lady of Sorrows on December 25, 1843.

The Diocese of Natchez (now the Diocese of Jackson) was erected in 1837, and in 1842 construction began on a new cathedral.  It was dedicated on December 25, 1843, but the diocese had to wait until 1882 for the building to be completed, forty years after construction commenced.  The building was consecrated on September 19, 1886, and remained the cathedral of the diocese until 1977.  It was designated a minor basilica on September 8, 1998, and dedicated as such on September 25, 1999.

In 2007 the body of Bishop John J. Chanche, S.S. the first Catholic bishop of Mississippi, was exhumed from a Baltimore, Maryland catholic cemetery and returned to Natchez to be reinterred in St. Mary Basilica's church yard.

                    

                    

                    

Additional info:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary_Basilica%2C_Natchez

                    

Magnolia Hall Historic Home

Construction on Magnolia Hall is believed to have begun in 1858, as the residence of Thomas Henderson, a Natchez native who became a wealthy cotton broker and merchant. The house was built on the site of the Henderson family home, Pleasant Hill, which was moved one block south to free the lot for the grander, more modern home. The name of the house was inspired by the plaster magnolia blossoms incorporated into the design of the parlor ceiling centerpieces. It was restored by the Natchez Garden Club as a house museum and is operated by the club today.

Additional info:  https://www.visitnatchez.org/business/magnolia-hall-historic-home

The Natchez are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area in the Lower Mississippi Valley, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi in the United States.  They spoke a language with no known close relatives, although it may be very distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek Confederacy.  An early American geographer noted in his 1797 gazetteer that they were also known as the "Sun Set Indians."

The Natchez are noted for being the only Mississippian culture with complex chiefdom characteristics to have survived long into the period of European colonization.  Other Mississippian societies in the southeast had generally experienced important transformations shortly after contact with the Spanish Empire or other newcomers from across the ocean.  The Natchez are also noted for having had an unusual social system of nobility classes and exogamous marriage practices.  It was a strongly matrilineal kinship society, with descent reckoned along female lines.  The paramount chief named the Great Sun was always the son of the Female Sun, whose daughter would be the mother of the next Great Sun.  This ensured that the chiefdom stayed under the control of the single Sun lineage.  Ethnologists have not reached consensus on how the Natchez social system originally functioned, and the topic is somewhat controversial.

In 1731, after several wars with the French, the Natchez were defeated.  Most of the captured survivors were shipped to Saint-Domingue and sold into slavery; others took refuge with other tribes, such as the Muskogean Chickasaw and Creek, and the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee. Today, most Natchez families and communities are found in Oklahoma, where Natchez members are enrolled in the federally recognized Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) nations in Oklahoma.  Two Natchez communities are recognized by the state of South Carolina.

Additional info:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natchez_people

The Emerald Mound site (22 AD 504), also known as the Selsertown site, is a Plaquemine culture Mississippian period archaeological site located on the Natchez Trace Parkway near Stanton, Mississippi, United States.  The site dates from the period between 1200 and 1730 CE. It is the type site for the Emerald Phase (1500 to 1680 CE) of the Natchez Bluffs Plaquemine culture chronology and was still in use by the later historic Natchez people for their main ceremonial center. The platform mound is the second-largest Mississippian period earthwork in the country, after Monk's Mound at Cahokia, Illinois.

The mound covers eight acres, measuring 770 feet by 435 feet at the base and is 35 feet in height.  Emerald Mound has a flat top with two smaller secondary mounds at each end. It was constructed around a natural hill.  Travelers in the early 19th century noted a number of adjoining mounds and an encircling ditch that are no longer present.  This site once had six other secondary mounds which were lost due to the plowing of the surface of the mound.  Emerald Mound was stabilized by the National Park Service in 1955.  It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989.  The mound is now managed by the Park Service's Natchez Trace Parkway unit, and is open to the public.

Emerald Mound was constructed during 1250 and 1600 CE, and is the type site for the Emerald Phase (1500 - 1680) of the Plaquemine culture Natchez Bluffs chronology.  It was used as a ceremonial center for a population who resided in outlying villages and hamlets, but takes its name from the historic Emerald Plantation that surrounded the mound in the 19th century.  The large mound began as a natural hill, which was built up by workers' depositing earth along the sides, reshaping it and creating an elongated, pentagonal-shaped, artificial plateau.  Two smaller mounds sit on either end of the summit of the primary mound.  The larger of the two sits at the western end, and measures 190 feet by 160 feet at the base and is 30 feet in height.  The smaller mounds on the summit are believed to be platforms for homes of chiefs and other key leaders.

The summit of the mound is roughly 65 feet above the surrounding landscape.  Early drawings suggest that six smaller mounds, three on either side, flanked the edges of the primary mound between the two secondary mounds, but were flattened by erosion and plowing in the 19th century.  Originally a constructed ditch, part of the earthworks, encircled the entire complex.

Archaeologists believe that the Plaquemine culture builders were the ancestors of the historic Natchez, who inhabited the area and used Emerald Mound site as their main ceremonial center at time of first European contact.  At its height, Emerald would have been the center of religious and civic rituals for the area, with the ceremonial center located on top of Emerald Mound, an unusual feature rarely seen in other mound centers.  The secondary mounds were the bases of a temple and residence of a priest or ruler and other elites. By the late 1730s, the Natchez had abandoned Emerald, possibly because of social upheaval that followed extensive fatalities from European diseases introduced to the American Southeast by the de Soto expedition in the 1540s.  By the time of the La Salle Expedition of 1682, the tribe's main ceremonial center was located at the Grand Village of the Natchez or Fatherland site, 12 miles to the southwest. Emerald was abandoned during the French colonial period, and the hereditary chief lived at the Grand Village.  The people of the tribe lived in a widely dispersed settlement pattern, mainly in small hamlets and on family farms.  They periodically assembled at the ceremonial centers for religious and social events.  This settlement appears to have been one of the last active expressions of the large platform mound-building culture along the Mississippi River.

Additional info:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Mound_site

The Grand Village is a 128-acre site featuring three prehistoric Native American mounds, a reconstructed Natchez Indian house, and museum. Additional features of the site include a nature trail, a “Touch Table” for children, and a Visitor Center with gift shop featuring Native American crafts.

Two of the mounds, the Great Sun’s Mound and the Temple Mound, have been excavated and rebuilt to their original sizes and shapes. A religious structure once stood atop the Temple Mound and housed bones of previous chiefs (called Suns). A sacred perpetual fire was kept in the Temple’s inner sanctum, symbolic of the sun, from which the royal family had descended.

A third mound, called the Abandoned Mound, has been only partially excavated. After three major archaeological excavations at the Grand Village by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, no further digging investigations are planned for the site. The unexcavated areas of the site will be preserved intact, representing a sort of “time capsule” from the Natchez Indians’ past.

Additional info:  mdah.ms.gov/explore-mississippi/grand-village-natchez-indians

Our boat sailed at 5 PM and will arrive Baton Rouge at 8 tomorrow morning.