May 3, 2008

May 3, 2008

Back in Natchez, MS we stopped first at Natchez National Historic Park. This site turns out to be another cotton plantation estate called Melrose. We have seen enough old houses and this one doesn’t seem to have anything unique so we pass on the house tour. I am not sure why the National Park system owns it. We take a few minutes to walk the grounds where we discover a slave house with an interesting museum on slavery. We were surprised to learn that a black woman in New York successfully sued to use the public bus. This was 100 years before Rosa Parks and she was represented by future president Chester A. Arthur!

We drove to the tourist info center where we watched a movie on the history of Natchez. Natchez was the New Orleans of the cotton plantations. Not wanting to really live on the plantation, the millionaire owners had their town homes here.

From the tourist center, we gave ourselves an abbreviated walking tour of the historic downtown. Our first stop was the second unit of the Natchez Historical Park, the William Johnson House. I wasn’t expecting much, but it turned out to have an interesting wrinkle. This city house was owned by a freed black man who became modestly wealthy owning a string of barbershops. He accumulated enough wealth to build a nice brick home in Natchez and purchase a small farm nearby. Oddly enough he even owned slaves. What made his story unique was that he kept a journal of his experiences living as free black in antebellum times. An early blogger!

We finished our walking tour of Natchez admiring the exteriors of some rather large mansions surrounded by flowering magnolia trees. The biggest was 14,000 sq. ft. On the way out of town we stopped at Longwood, the largest and most unique house. Built as a 6-story octagonal tower, the owner had the great misfortune of starting construction in 1860 and he never could finish the interior because of the war. The family ended up living in the basement. At only 10,000 sq. ft., it was hardly livable. When finished Longwood was to be 30,000 sq. ft!

We left town heading north on the Natchez Trace Parkway. It is a little used highway running through the forest paralleling the original trail. Quite nice and peaceful. Commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, this early highway was built to connect the far southwestern corner of the US (Natchez) to Nashville. Along the way we stopped at Emerald Mound, an Indian platform from the Mississippian culture. We spent the night at a private RV Park in Vicksburg, MS.