Natchez District
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The Natchez District was recognized to be the area east of the Mississippi River from Bayou Sara in the South (presently St. Francisville, LA) and Bayou Pierre in the North (presently Port Gibson, MS).
The Natchez District was the first plantation area in Mississippi and also the richest area in the Deep South before the Civil War. One plantation owner by the name of Stephen Duncan was reported to have owned over 1,000 slaves, making him the wealthiest cotton plantation owner in the world then.
The area had been known to the Europeans for many years. The French explorer, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, had passed through the area in 1699 and had christened both the Amite River and the Tangipahoa River. In the early 1700s, French colonists began to introduce African slaves and the plantation system to the area. The first important plantation crop was tobacco.
By 1776, there was a sizable colony of English-speaking planters there. By a treaty with Spain after the Revolutionary War, the Natchez District became a part of the United States. The area was of great strategic value to the US then because it was the most extreme western and southern limits of the territory claimed by the United States in 1798. In April 1798, the United States created the Mississippi Territory with Natchez as its first capital.
Yet, it wasn't until around 1800, when the Whitney’s cotton gin was perfected that planters in the Natchez District became very wealthy. The rich loess soils proved very fertile for cotton cultivation. Many cotton planters became so wealthy that they enslaved hundred of African Americans, built elegant mansions in and around the town of Natchez, and hired overseers to live at and manage their plantations in the countryside.
In 1806, an improved Mexican variety of cotton made it even more profitable. The Mexican variety was crossed with the older black seeded species to make improved varieties that made the State of Mississippi famous. The most famous varieties of all, Belle Creole, Jethro, Parker and Petit Gulf, were bred in Mississippi.
Before 1810, Natchez was the only town in the region that was not under foreign control. Because of its strategic importance and its rapid growth as a cotton port, the US government built or improved roads leading to Natchez. The US Army widened the Natchez Trace into a wagon road and placed it under the care of the Post Office Department.
[edit] Recent developments
After the district was developed in the early 1900s, the neighborhood remained vibrant, if somewhat shabby, into the 1950s and 1960s, even as the Federal Housing Authority established public housing projects there to bring residents out of unsafe living conditions.
Segregation had forced the black community to exist independently, giving the Natchez area everything it needed — stores, dancehalls, hotels — within a few short blocks. As integration arrived, changes came quickly to the self-contained community. Just to the west of the neighborhood's boundaries, a new development of 16 luxury condominiums is being built. Gentrification — the process in which low-income housing is turned into higher-income housing — is displacing the lower-income residents and the historic neighborhood could risk losing its identity.
In recent years, Natchez Street has gained a reputation as a drug hangout and locus for gang activity.
[edit] External links
- http://www.tennessean.com/williamsonam/news/archives/05/03/68951816.shtml
- http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~pmullins/chapter05.htm
- http://ocean.otr.usm.edu/~aloung/afram.html
