The Post that Ate Natchez

I hear New Orleans and I smell river and alcohol and I hear bottle-cap tap shoes on pavement outside an open window of an oyster bar and I see sun-soaked Jackson Square under a blue sky. Memphis is the smell of barbecue in an alley and the elegance and tradition of the Peabody Hotel juxtoposed with the decay and sprawl and general tackiness of much of the area.

Natchez, Mississippi brings to mind the word languid, wedding cake houses, river trade, unabashed marketing and promoting, old brick streets, and a pronounced, palpable sense of history.

We stayed at a hotel right on the river. You know about the high river, the rain, and the floods and all, right? When I say we stayed on the river, we were RIGHT ON THE RIVER. I could have tossed a stone left-handed and have it hit the river. We were close, is what I'm saying. This was the view from our window Saturday morning.

As was this.

(I have to work this in somewhere. I picked up a brochure in the hotel lobby to learn that Vidalia, Louisiana has a "Vittles and Fiddles Festival.")

Driving across the above pictured bridge from Vidalia to Natchez.

As you may know, we visited the Natchez Coffee Company. I love this chair.



And this clock.

Down the street from the coffee shop:

Does this remind you of New Orleans?


People in Natchez are ever so polite.


The gate was the entrance to a jewelry box of a park - small and exquisite - that featured this fountain and some of the biggest live oaks we'd ever seen.


And this.


We next stood dumbstruck as we looked at this:

St. Mary's Basilica, which was built in the mid 1800s. Construction began in 1841 and it took ten years to complete. Incredible is an understatement.





We left downtown and drove to the Natchez City Cemetery.
Some of the markers date to the 1700s. We wanted to see the Turning Angel statue, which we did. It's a devastating monument. In a way, I wanted to photograph it, but I couldn't. It would have seemed macabre and just . . . wrong.

Natchez has a National Cemetery. Did you know this? Because I didn't. It's on the bluff. We drove through, spoke quietly, had cold chills. The way the monuments are aligned reminded me of Arlington National Cemetery. Maybe all national cemeteries are like that? It's impressive and solemn. No pictures from there, either, for the same reasons.

Moving on.

We had lunch at Magnolia Grill.
You can read more soon about that meal here.

The Magnolia Grill is at Natchez Under the Hill, what was once a notorious river landing. Lined with saloons, it was populated by gamblers, ladies of the night, and cutthroats. (Literally. The Bowie knife originated here.)

Today Natchez Under the Hill is much more tame and popular with tourists, who don't have to worry about chancing upon a trap door saloon, wherein one was robbed, clubbed senseless, and tossed through a trap door that opened into the river.



Before we left Natchez, we toured Longwood, an ante bellum home.

It's unique because of its octagonal shape and the fact that it is unfinished; the Civil War broke out midway and workers, who were from Philadelphia, set down their paint buckets and brushes and tools and left to fight in the war. The home is unfinished to this day, down to the abandoned builders' tools on the second floor.


You can read the history here, which is fascinating stuff. There were any number of things about the place that I could not wrap my mind around, including the following, in no particular order:

-- The basement floor of that house is 10,000 square feet. (That's not a typo; ten thousand square feet.) The architect's drawing of the house? Shows it having three floors at 10,000 feet each. I'm no mathematician but ya'll, that is a thirty-thousand square foot house. The mind, it boggles.

-- A number of furnishings original to the home are there. So the ginormous mirror, imported from France, that I stood in front of, the family who lived there, the man who built the house for his wife, they stood in front of it. So did any of their eight children. So did any of the Union officers who occupied the home. So did the slave whose portrait hangs in the foyer. The thought of all that history, all those lives - it gives me something akin to vertigo.

-- The windows at the cupola are sixteen feet tall and there are eight of them. Or maybe it's sixteen windows that are eight feet tall. Something like that. Anyway, the house was designed so those windows, along with the other kajillion windows and doors throughout the house, could be opened, creating a chimney draft effect, meaning the hot air would rise and drift out of the the windows at the tippy top of the house. That seems some pretty advanced thinking to me.

-- Thirty. Thousand. Square. Feet. Even by Natchez standards - and at that time, the town boasted one of the highest per-capita rates of millionaires in the entire country - that seems excessive.

What follows are a number of photographs. Understand that I am showing considerable restraint. I'm going to say that again: CONSIDERABLE RESTRAINT. The photo opportunities were boundless. I took something like 272 photographs in under 24 hours; a number of them were at Longwood.

Standing dead center on the second floor, that is looking straight up, aaaallll the way to the cupola. I know! I was not exaagerating about the unfinishedness of the house.


This is the original spire that was on top of the cupola. The tour guide said why it was there - something about it being wooden and temporary until the got the one shipped there, the one that's on the top now? I don't know - I was trying to listen but the impact this place and its history was having on me was too powerful. Very near where that spire was laying on its side was the crate that the piano came in. Way back when. When the family lived in the basement, which was supposed to be temporary, until the silly little war was over.



I have no photographs of the dining room, alas, but imagine a grand table (oak? mahogany?) with seating for twelve, with a large wooden fan above it to keep flies away (that has a name but I cannot for anything remember it), fine china with a pastel pink border, and a modified plate warmer by the fireplace. Lavish.






Restraint! Showing restraint!


After leaving Natchez, we made a stop on the drive home. I'll have that story and the photos - which are incredible, if I do say so myself - in the next day or two.

For now, I'm still trying to take in and process all that we saw and did.