Natchez preserves over 600 pre-Civil War structures, including dozens of mansion houses open for tours. Stanton Hall, built in 1857, sprawls across an entire city block with Corinthian columns and original furnishings. Longwood, an octagonal Oriental Revival mansion, was left unfinished when the Civil War began - workers' tools still lie where they dropped them in 1861. Rosalie overlooks the river from the bluff, its gardens commanding the view that made the site strategic. Melrose, a National Park Service property, preserves not just the main house but the entire plantation complex including slave quarters. The Natchez Pilgrimage, held spring and fall since 1932, opens private homes to visitors and fills the mansions with costumed guides.

Natchez had two faces: the respectable town on the bluff and Natchez-Under-the-Hill at the river landing below. Under-the-Hill was notorious throughout the Mississippi Valley - saloons, gambling houses, and brothels serving the flatboatmen and riverboat crews who made the town a port. Mark Twain described it; travelers warned against it. The district's reputation was so dark that respectable Natchez residents pretended it didn't exist. Floods and fires destroyed most of the original buildings; what remains is a quiet strip of restaurants and shops far removed from its violent past. The Lady Luck casino boat docks here now, a sanitized echo of the gambling that once made Under-the-Hill infamous.

The Natchez Trace connected Natchez to Nashville, 440 miles through wilderness that was once the most traveled road in the Old Southwest. Boatmen who floated goods down the Mississippi to Natchez and New Orleans walked home on the Trace; it could take weeks. The trail passed through Chickasaw and Choctaw territory; travelers risked bandits, disease, and the elements. The Trace's most famous travelers - Meriwether Lewis died mysteriously at an inn along it in 1809 - used a route that Native Americans had followed for centuries. Today the Natchez Trace Parkway follows the historic corridor, a scenic two-lane road with no commercial traffic, beginning in Natchez and ending near Nashville.

Natchez's wealth came from cotton - and from the enslaved people who grew it. By 1860, Adams County had more millionaires per capita than anywhere in America; their wealth was counted in land and human beings. The Forks of the Road, at the edge of town, was one of the largest slave markets in the South; tens of thousands of people were sold there. The mansions that survive were built by slave labor, maintained by slave labor, surrounded by slave quarters that tourists long ignored. Recent interpretation has begun including enslaved people's stories - the William Johnson House preserves the home of a free Black barber who kept detailed diaries; the Forks of the Road site is now marked and interpreted.

Natchez is 90 miles southwest of Jackson on US-61, the old Blues Highway that runs from New Orleans to Memphis. Baton Rouge (90 miles south) offers the nearest commercial airport. The Mississippi River defines Natchez's western edge; the Natchez-Vidalia Bridge crosses to Louisiana. Population has declined from 23,000 in 1960 to under 15,000 today; the mansions that attract tourists are maintained by a shrinking tax base. From altitude, Natchez appears as a small city on river bluffs - the grand homes visible as tree-shaded properties along the bluff edge, the Mississippi bending around the point. What appears from the air as a quiet Southern town preserves more antebellum architecture than anywhere in America, frozen because the wealth that built it left with the Cotton Kingdom.