MS -- Natchez:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Description of Pictures: This restaurant, Mammy's Cupboard, was recommended to me as a place for dinner but I never made it. The character on the building was painted as a Caucasian at some point to avoid racial comments.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.235.46.191 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1] NATCHZ_070129_02.JPG
|
[2] NATCHZ_070129_13.JPG
|
[3] NATCHZ_070129_22.JPG
|
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Wikipedia Description: Natchez, Mississippi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Natchez is the county seat and largest city within Adams County, Mississippi. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 18,464. One of Mississippi's oldest cities, it was founded in 1716, predating the current capital city — Jackson — by more than a century. Located along the Mississippi River, Natchez is the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace Parkway. The city is famous in American history for its role in the development of the Old Southwest, particularly with respect to its location on the Mississippi River.
Natchez is the principal city of the Natchez, Mississippi-Louisiana Micropolitan Statistical Area.
History:
Pre-European settlement (to 1716):
The site of Natchez is the grand ceremonial village of the Natchez tribe (pronounced "Nochi"), who had occupied the site in a culture that was unbroken since the 8th century, according to archaeological finds. Their language, Natchez, can be linked to the Muskogean language family, indicating that the Natchez probably developed from earlier indigenous cultures in the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Their society was divided into nobles and commoners according to matrilineal descent. The Natchez chief, the "Great Sun" owed his position to the rank of his mother.
The flat-topped ceremonial mounds built by the Natchez show the influence of moundbuilding cultures to the north in the Middle Mississippi River Valley (see Mississippian culture). At Natchez the Grand Village of the Natchez is preserved as a National Historic Landmark, and nearby Emerald Mound, an earlier ceremonial center, may be seen near the Natchez Trace Parkway.
Colonial history (1716-1783):
In 1716 the French founded Fort Rosalie, an outpost in the Natchez territory. The fort's inhabitants often found themselves in conflict with the Natchez, who were influenced by British agents and when outright warfare erupted in November 1729 (the "Natchez War"), they eradicated the entire Indian population (although some Natchez refugees fled to the Creeks and Cherokees). On November 28, 1729, the Natchez Indians killed 138 Frenchmen, 35 French women, and 56 children (the largest death toll by an Indian attack in Mississippi's history). Descendants of the Natchez diaspora survive as the Natchez Nation, a treaty tribe and confederate of the federally recognized Muscogee (Creek) Nation with a sovereign traditional government . Subsequently, Fort Rosalie, which was renamed after the extinguished tribe, spent periods under Spanish, and British colonial rule before being ceded to the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1783). A census of the Natchez district taken in 1784 counted 1,619 people, including 498 African-American slaves.
Under the early republic (1783-1860):
In the late 18th century Natchez was the starting point of the Natchez Trace overland route, which ran from Natchez to Nashville, Tennessee through what is now Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Flatboatmen and keelboatmen (locally called "Kaintucks" because they were usually from what is now Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana) who floated their produce downriver, often sold their wares at Natchez, including their boats as lumber, then made the trek back north overland.
On October 27, 1795, the Spanish signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, by which Natchez was surrendered to the United States. In 1798, when the Mississippi Territory was created by the Adams administration, Natchez became its capital. After 19 years as territorial capital, on 10 December 1817, Natchez became the first capital of the state of Mississippi. Though the capital was shifted to the more-centrally-located city of Jackson in 1822, over the course of the 19th century, Natchez became a town of strategic economic importance, due to its location on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, developing into a bustling port for steamboats. At Natchez, many local cotton plantation owners loaded their cotton onto steamboats at the landing known as "Natchez-Under-the-Hill" and transported their wares downriver to New Orleans or sometimes upriver to St. Louis, Missouri or Cincinnati, Ohio, where the cotton would be sold and transported to Northern spinning mills.
The Natchez region, along with the Sea Islands of South Carolina, pioneered cotton agriculture in the United States. Until new hybridized breeds of cotton were created in the early 19th century, it was uneconomical to grow cotton in the United States anywhere other than these two areas. Although South Carolina came to dominate the cotton plantation culture of much of the Antebellum South, it was the Natchez District that experimented with hybridization, making the cotton boom possible.
On May 7, 1840, an intense tornado struck Natchez. This tornado killed 269 persons in Natchez, most of whom were on flatboats in the Mississippi River. The tornado killed 317 persons in all, making it the second deadliest tornado in United States history. This tornado is today known as the "Great Natchez Tornado."
The terrain around Natchez on the Mississippi side of the river is rather hilly. The city sits on a high bluff above the Mississippi river and in order to reach the riverbank one must travel down a steep road to the landing called Silver Street. This is in marked contrast to the flat lowland found across the river surrounding the city of Vidalia, Louisiana. Natchez is known for its many Antebellum mansions and estates, built by 19th century plantation owners, who would often own farmland in Louisiana but locate their homes on the higher ground in Mississippi. Prior to the Civil War, Natchez had the most millionaires per capita of any city in the United States due to the large number of plantation owners who owned land across the Mississippi River but dwelt in large mansions in Natchez, making it arguably the wealthiest city in the nation at the time. Today the city boasts that it has more antebellum houses than anywhere else in the United States, partly due to the fact that during the American Civil War Natchez was spared the destruction of many other Southern cities, such as Vicksburg.
American Civil War (1861-1865):
During the Civil War, Natchez remained largely undisturbed, although Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant occupied Natchez in 1863; Grant set up his temporary headquarters in the Natchez mansion Rosalie. Like almost everywhere else in the United States, numerous Natchez residents did in fact fight or participate otherwise in the war and many families lost their antebellum fortunes.
The fact that the town was largely spared the horrors of the war is illustrated by the legend of the Battle of Natchez. According to this story, Union troops were being housed in Natchez, civilians and regular bar owners gathered at the river landing to watch Union gunboats travel the Mississippi River from Vicksburg down to New Orleans. In one passing, a Union gunboat fired a blank from a canon to rile up the Union troops at Fort Rosalie. This caused an elderly man to have a heart attack at Under the Hill–the one casualty in the Battle of Natchez.
Despite the city's relatively peaceful atmosphere under Union occupation, Natchez residents remained somewhat defiant of the Federal authorities. In 1864, the Roman Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Natchez, William Henry Elder, refused to obey a Federal order to compel his parishioners to pray for the President of the United States. In response, the Federals arrested Elder, convicted him, and jailed him briefly across the river in Vidalia, Louisiana. Eventually Elder was released and returned to his duties until 1880, when he was elevated to archbishop of Cincinnati.
Postwar period (1865-present):
Natchez was able to make a rapid economic comeback in the postwar years, as much of the commercial traffic on the Mississippi River resumed. In addition to cotton, the development of local industries like logging added to the exports through the city's wharf. In return, Natchez saw an influx of manufactured goods from Northern markets like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis.
The city's prominent place in Mississippi River commerce over the nineteenth century has been illustrated by the nine different steamboats plying the lower river between 1823 and 1918 that were named Natchez, many of which were built for and commanded by the famous Captain Thomas P. Leathers, whom Jefferson Davis had wanted to head the Confederate defense fleet on the Mississippi River, though this never materialized. In 1885, the Anchor Line, known for its sublime luxury steamboats operating between St. Louis and New Orleans, launched its "brag boat," the City of Natchez, though this boat survived only a year before succumbing to a fire at Cairo, Illinois, on 28 December 1886. Since 1975, an excursion steamboat at New Orleans has also borne the name Natchez.
This river commerce sustained the city's economic growth until just after the turn of the twentieth century, when steamboat traffic began to be replaced by the railroads. The city's economy declined over the course of the century, as in many Mississippi towns, although tourism has helped compensate for the decline.
In 1940, 209 people died in a fire at the Rhythm Night Club. This fire has been noted as the fourth deadliest fire in U.S. history.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].