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Natchez, Antebellum Gem

In the western section of what we know today as the Old South is the town of Natchez, described by Therese Yelverton, the vicountess of Avonmore who visited Natchez just after the war. She wrote that “Natchez, before the war, had been the Bath or Clifton of the South, and the residences had more the appearance of wealth and style than those of any Southern city, with a few exceptions. They were the town residences of the planters, who owned large estates on the Mississippi but who lived, for the most part, at Natchez as being healthier than the low bottomlands of the river. The houses were mostly detached and really merited the name of family residences. They were solidly constructed of brick, covered in brown cement resembling stone, and had massive columns ascending from the front doorway to the top gable of the house, giving it a majestic appearance and affording also a delightful shade.”

Settled by the French in 1716, and later occupied by the English and then the Spanish, Natchez is the second oldest continuous settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley. However, its was not until the invention of the cotton gin shortly after the new town was laid out, about 1790, that the Natchez area received the enormous riches of the cotton boom. Happily located at the geographic center of the world’s richest cotton growing region, to be rivaled, and then only after the war, by that other valley noted for the enriching floods of its river, the Nile, Natchez became capital to the nation’s Deep South Cotton Kingdom.

Early Entrepreneurs
Attracted by the possibility of getting rich and doing it very quickly, entrepreneurs flooded into town, joining those few families who had settled the area in the eighteenth century. They came from all parts of the European world but most of them were Americans from the Middle Atlantic States and points north, traveling not across the wilderness South but down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers or around Florida through New Orleans. They retained their northern connections and many considered themselves Americans first and Southerners second.

In their commercial and social dealings, even those born in Natchez were citizens of the United States. They banked in New York. They shopped in Philadelphia and New York and only later in New Orleans. They sent their daughters to school in Philadelphia and New York and their sons to college in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. They owned land across the nation (Frank Surget owned a large part of the land that became Madison, Wisconsin). They summered at all the right places and they traveled all over.

They were few in number but large in fortune. In 1860, only 6,600 people populated the town. Charleston was ten times larger. But the cotton fortunes in the lower Mississippi were so enormous that economic historians tell us that there were more millionaires in Natchez then than in any other American city, excepting New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

When they built their houses, they did not place them on the flood-prone former swamps that were their plantations but instead at Natchez, high above the lowlands on city blocks like Magnolia Hall, built in 1858 or, more usually, on small suburban estates of a hundred acres or less, like 1836 D’Evereux or 1856 Dunlieth. Though Gervase Wheeler, in his 1854 publication, Rural Homes, lamented America’s general lack of interest in the development of the suburban villa, this lack of interest was certainly not true of Natchez, where the suburban villa concept was the ideal of the city’s planting society. Frederick Law Olmsted noted during a visit to Natchez; “Within three miles of the town the country is entirely occupied by houses and grounds of a villa character.”

Architects and builders
The leading architects and builders of Natchez were British or American in background. From Massachusetts in 1809 came Levi Weeks to design and build giant order classical columns in 1812 at Auburn. From Scotland came James Hardie, whose first known work is Choctaw in 1836. From England came Captain Thomas Rose who gained Natchez experience to design and build Stanton Hall in 1857. From Maryland came Jacob Byers, who culminated his Natchez career with the design and construction of Melrose in 1847 and from Philadelphia Samuel Sloan was commissioned to design Longwood in 1860.

For the most part, Natchez architecture was responsive to the local idiom that had been developed to cope with the warm damp weather. On the other hand, interior decoration was not bound by the dictates of climate and could be more “a la mode.” For instance, the parlor of newly furnished Lansdowne in Natchez was as fashionably decorated in 1853 as a New York parlor pictured the same year in a periodical.

Home furnishings
To furnish their homes, the planters kept up to date by subscribing to publications like Godey’s Ladies Book, by attending exhibits, by frequenting the newest hotels and attending parties in private homes, and by visiting directly the leading furniture makers of America. All this they could do while on their frequent trips north.

Eliza Baker, writing in 1803 not long after her arrival from New Jersey, documents not only this propensity to travel but also her shock at the level of society, for she wrote: “The women are so immoderately attached to dancing that they appear to think of little else besides. We have had many polite invitations to their parties, which we have thought proper to decline. Among so many fashionable people I am not ashamed to appear singular. People here think nothing of going round to New York or Philadelphia, but I will not flatter myself with such a prospect.”

Olmstead was similarly disdainful of the fashionable style of living, connecting it to their travel. In response to his question about the Natchez nabobs summering in Kentucky to escape the heat, he recorded the following answer: “No, sir. They go north, to New York, and Newport, and Saratoga, and Cape May, and Seneca Lake – somewhere they can display themselves worse than they do here. Kentucky is no place for that.”

Letters by Mrs. J. T. McMurran of Melrose in 1851 document her family’s summer trip to the Catskill Mountain house, with stops in New York and Philadelphia. The trip included an extended visit with family near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and a short visit with their son at Princeton, and concluded with a month or so in Newport, where their Natchez cousins owned a house. Writing on August 16, c. 1859, she said, “Newport is crowded now & they say never fuller -- & it seems to me all Natchez is here, at least almost all of our friends and acquaintances.”

Nabobs
Today Natchez is a small town on the Mississippi River, and it has a population of about 18,000. Shortly before the Civil War, its population was only about 6,000. But despite its small size, it was home to more millionaires than any other American town, except New York and possibly Boston and Philadelphia. These rich people were known as the Nabobs of Natchez. They were the richest cotton planters in the world and Natchez was their residential and social center. It was the symbolic capital of the Cotton Kingdom.

Before the Civil War, there was nowhere in the world where you could find a more complete and concentrated group of Southern mansions than in Natchez. It was the epitome of the American cotton culture on the eve of the Civil War and is today the very image of the era of Gone with the Wind.

Reprinted courtesy of The Natchez Convention & Visitors Bureau.