(foreboding classical music) - [Narrator] The Natchez Indians lived in this area that has become known as Natchez.

They were the most “civilized" of all the Native Americans that the Europeans discovered here.

The Natchez, after almost 15 years of dealing with the French finally figured it had gone too far and rose against the French and massacred all the French at Fort Rosalie in 1729.

The French retaliated over a period of several years and drove the Natchez away from the Grand Village.

(somber string music) - [Man] To begin with, the place.

It's a combination of things which might not individually be unique, but in combination are.

The position on this high Loess Bluff overlooking the river, the architecture, which is unique, the people who are fun-loving people, and who, despite their small town place of living are rather cosmopolitan in their outlook.

- [Woman] There's always been so much in this area that has been attractive to people.

We continue to have people coming either as tourists or guests who can't believe it.

You mean all of these houses, all of this furniture, all of this gorgeous country, your trees, your flowers, your fields, how have we not known it before?

- [Man 2] We are a very interesting part of the world because we've been part of the Spanish rule, French rule.

We were part of West Florida.

I think it's a beautiful part of the history of this country.

Like I say, it's been influenced by several cultures and it has it right now, whether Natchez people understand it or not, but it has a lot of the effect of the French and the Spanish right today.

It's a little bit of everything.

- [Man 3] Of course Natchez is the oldest city on the Mississippi River.

We are older than New Orleans.

At one time was the most thriving community in the United States, and had more millionaires than anything, any other city other than New York City.

- [Man 4] Natchez has always had some people in it who had money.

But you know, after you've once got money, it's a whole lot easier to keep going than it is if you've got to start from nothing.

- [Woman 2] And another thing, in small towns, small southern towns, we have less to occupy us.

We don't have as much to do.

So we kind of concentrate on our history.

We talk a lot about our ancestors.

Only the nice ones.

We don't talk about the ones that got hanged.

(banjo music) - [Woman 3] Natchez-Under-the-Hill was a terrible place.

Shooting, and killing, and drinking, and gambling.

And they had all kinds of saloons there.

That is the landing, though, for all the sailors and all the people who came to Natchez, they had to get off at Under-the-Hill.

- [Man 5] Well I've heard people say that besides Sodom and Gomorrah, Natchez comes next.

(laughs) - [Man 6] You just had a mixture of cultures, and people coming for the weekend.

They just celebrated.

- [Woman 4] It had a terrible reputation.

And decent people never went Under-the-Hill.

But you know whether they did or not because maybe they did.

- [Man 7] Under-the-Hill was settled by riverboats gamblers and pirates.

Their biggest ambition was to make it up the hill, because that was the step up in grade to society.

And most of the real thieves and cutthroats that became civilized and made it up the hill have done all right.

- [Man 8] Was a people that had come from North Carolina to get away from this conflict that was coming up.

They were very loyal to the king and they didn't want to get involved in a rebellion, as they called it.

And of course there were mixed emotions.

It's true that Natchez was a hub of loyalists.

(courtly music) (somber piano and flute music) - [Woman 5] Why had they left the East?

Why had they left the North?

Was it because it was getting too crowded?

Were they younger sons who moved out on their own?

This was wilderness country.

This was rugged living.

(somber music swells) - [Man 9] Yellow Fever hit Natchez regularly in the late summer and early fall and killed people.

Lots.

Whole families would die.

You can see their graves and the tombstones in the city cemetery of entire families wiped out within a one or two month period.

- [Woman 6] And in those days, the landowners all had their homes in Natchez, in the hills, because of the mosquitoes.

And they didn't know what was giving them all Yellow Fever over there in the low lands, but as you know it turned out to be the mosquitoes.

So they planted over there and lived over here most of the time.

- [Woman 7] Natchez was the point with Louisiana Purchase spread out there tremendous potential and land.

- [Man 10] The steamboat came along just at the right time.

Much land was being opened up and they were growing cotton, and now they could do something with it.

They could gin it.

They also had a tremendous amount of labor in the form of slave labor.

Well then Capt.

Henry Shreve created an entirely new concept, making the boat to fit the river.

A flat hull boat.

No place for the machinery in the hull, so he put it on the first deck.

And then he had to build a second story for the freight and passengers.

And in doing this, he created what later became known as the classic Mississippi River steamboat.

This, more than anything else, opened the river to trade and political development, for that matter.

Cotton from the Mississippi Valley was shipped all over the world.

- [Man 11] Now one thing is if you look across into Louisiana you see the flat country over there.

Most of the early settlers that made the real money owned land in Louisiana, planted cotton over there because it was very productive.

And that is what brought in the money that built these beautiful antebellum homes.

I've heard it said by my mother whose grandfather was a planter, that men could make a fortune in three years, but they could also lose it in one year.

Now with the combination of slave labor, rich land, and ready access to their market by water, it was the perfect set up to make anybody money.

- [Man 12] You would describe Natchez architecture in the late 18th and early 19th century in terms of resembling West Indian architecture.

An example is the Tavern that was built in the late 1790s, or very early 1800s.

Most of what had happened in the late 18th and early 19th century had been a vernacular, just common architectural tongue of the carpenters.

It was not pretentious.

Was described by some travelers as being low, long, close to the ground, full of doors and windows for ventilation.

Back when Levi Weeks was here in 1812, either he or someone who is familiar with his work designed a house called The Briars which took that vernacular style and developed it with detailing that's academic to reach the most elaborate and most refined example of the planter's small house that's common to the Mississippi Valley.

But beginning probably about 1812 when Auburn was constructed to the designs of Levi Weeks, a New England native, who had trained in New York and came to Natchez in 1808 or 1809.

And beginning with Auburn, we move into a more academic phase of architecture, which was by no means high style.

It was still regional.

Auburn established the form of the grand houses of Natchez, or most of them.

Yet, according to Levi Weeks, was the first house in the territory to have the classical orders on it.

And by that he meant the classical columns and tablature.

These giant two-story columns on the front of the building supporting the triangular pediment above them, not as wide as the building, was the form that became accepted here.

We find it around 1820 at Arlington.

We find it again around 1823 at Rosalie.

And you find that form occurring at Melrose in the mid-1840s.

You find it occurring at Stanton Hall in 1857.

And it's the form of most of the grand houses here, and one that is particular to Natchez.

You'll find it a little bit on some of the houses in Kentucky and elsewhere, but never or not anywhere else that I know of with the peculiarities of detail that are those of Natchez.

- [Man 13] We may not like what those houses stand for, but we contributed a lot to the making, and to the splendor of these houses.

The pyramids were built at the pain and the suffering of many people.

And you can't deny history just because you don't like it.

You may be even can take pride in surviving certain parts in history.

So these are things that help us to see our strength and to look at the world and look at our history and look at our success as well as our failures of this nation as well as us as a people.

(organ music) - [Woman 8] Some think that Mark Twain took the First Presbyterian Church and used it as the model for the church in "Huckleberry Finn."

Huckleberry was attending his own funeral and went up into the slave gallery of the church so that he could watch it unobserved.

They had been dragging the river looking for Huck for some time and decided he was dead.

And according to Mark Twain, Huck slipped into the slave gallery undetected.

Got up to the gallery in some way that didn't involve going through the main church.

That's hard to do in most churches that have slave galleries.

They are entered through the vestibule.

The First Presbyterian Church in Natchez is unique.

There are exterior doors that allow you to enter the slave gallery directly from the outside without going through the vestibule of the church at all.

Huckleberry ended up going to his own funeral, and that's why he was sitting up in the slave gallery.

(organ music continues) - [Man 14] During the coming of the Civil War, they had a meeting with some of the most prominent people in this community.

All were present and voted loyalty to the federal government.

They looked on secession as very dangerous.

And I'm a loyal Southerner.

But we are highly emotional people.

When the old wise head said look, this is wrong.

We've got to hold on to our union.

And we got carried away with this enthusiasm and we got worked into it and wiped out.

I mean the main loss, the people that died in that war was tremendous!

Yet the southern boys went right on into cannon fodder and died.

- [Man 15] As far as Natchez is concerned, it played a very minor part.

The Confederates didn't consider it important enough to defend, and the Federals weren't bothered to even occupy it until after they had captured Port Hudson and Vicksburg.

- [Woman 9] An order went out of Natchez that the ministers in the churches pray for the Union soldiers, and pray for the president.

Two members of the clergy defied that order.

One of them was Rev.

Watkins of the Methodist Church.

The other was Bishop Elder of St. Mary's Cathedral.

And I'm not sure whether the Rev.

Watkins spent any time in jail, but Bishop Elder was arrested, taken across the Mississippi River into Concordia Parish, and he was jailed in Vidalia.

If I'm correct, Bishop Elder was released on orders of Abraham Lincoln.

About the only activity in Natchez during the Civil War was in 1862 when a union gunboats, the Essex, shelled the city of Natchez.

The only casualty is Rosalie Beekman a young Jewish child whose parents operated a business in Natchez-Under-the-Hill.

Several shells hit buildings.

Magnolia Hall was hit.

Presbyterian Manse had a shell to land in the yard, but there was only one casualty, and that was Rosalie Beekman.

- [Man 16] It was not uncommon for a planter to be loyal to the Union.

A good many of them were.

They simply sought to protect their own interests.

Longwood is significant in several ways.

For one thing, it is a very graphic illustration of the economic impact the Civil War had on the South.

The grandest octagonal house ever built in America in an oriental style, exotic style, very lavish, built for a Southern planter, for a man who had lots of money, designed by northern architect, employing slaves to make brick, common laborers of the local area, and craftsman and mill workers from Philadelphia.

This grand venture, which started just before the Civil War began, slowly ground to a halt during the Civil War.

Work stopped.

The house was never finished.

The family lived in the basement.

Haller Nutt was a native of Mississippi.

His father had brought the Mexican strain of cotton into this part of the world in the early 19th century.

That was the basis for the cotton riches of the lower Mississippi Valley.

During the Civil War, he was loyal to the Union.

Despite protection papers from Gen. Grant, his plantations, and there were several, suffered the ravages of troops from both sides.

Both the Federals and the Confederates.

And it reduced his immense fortune to nearly nothing by the time the war was over, and he died, according to his wife, with a broken heart.

- [Man 17] You'd think that after the Civil War there wouldn't have been much built in Natchez, but what we have left from that period, especially in the downtown area, says that's not so.

We seem to have experienced a great surge of mercantile and commercial growth following the Civil War.

So there seems to be this economic rapid recovery.

But the people that were building these buildings downtown, and the people who are building many of the fine houses, rather than being planters, as I said, were businessmen.

- [Man 18] The boll weevil really played the dickens with this country.

We had a plantation with a thousand acres, a beautiful place.

The boll weevil got here maybe 1910, 1912, somewhere along in that.

The banks around Natchez, of course, were financing planters, farmers.

A big share of the banks went broke.

That boll weevil time was possibly the worst time that Natchez ever experienced and this whole country, Louisiana, everybody around us, they were all broke.

So when the boll weevil got so bad, turned the plantation back to the bank.

Days like today, these cloudy overcast days, the boll weevil would eat you alive.

Well of course we had the big Mardi Gras Ball.

The court was there and we would march around.

Everything was decorated and made up in a Mardi Gras, and everybody was made up like Mardi Gras, painted up, you know.

Then we had a dance.

But it was quite a gala program and time here in Natchez.

And it went on for almost a week.

We had parties for longer.

(Dixieland jazz music) - [Man 19] When you get right down to it, I guess my earliest recollection would be the Depression.

I came up in the Depression as a youngster.

Thinking back at it, why, everybody else was in the same position I was.

We lived in the country.

We lived on a plantation.

Times were very, very tough.

We did a lot of farming, truck farming.

Raised all the vegetables and that we could on the plantation everything and so forth.

Money was just a scarce commodity.

But no one had it, so no one missed it because we were all basically in the same boat.

People really suffered.

Not so much for food and things of that sort, but there just wasn't any money.

People grew their crops and things of that sort, and there wasn't any market for it.

Had to almost give it away.

Natchez was in a pathetic situation, I can tell you.

You couldn't find a job.

If you had a job making eight cents an hour, you better hold on to it, because you had 500 waiting for that same job.

(Dixieland jazz music) - [Woman 10] I would say Natchez is preserved because of poverty.

We were too poor to paint, and too proud to whitewash.

And so we just continued to live in these old homes because we didn't have the money to tear them down and rebuild.

Deborah was just absolutely in horrible condition.

You just can't imagine what it looked like.

And Twin Oaks was just horrible!

They didn't have any bathrooms and people had made holes in the floor.

The houses need a lot of repair work, and that was the idea of the pilgrimage.

They started paying each year, and you were supposed to take that money and only use it for restoring something in the house, like if your stairs had fallen down, a roof was leaking, or something like that.

So Ms. Miller really took the ball and ran with it.

- [Woman 11] I was made the president, and so I went around and asked each one of the houses if they would open the house.

Seeing how so few had ever seen inside the houses.

We had just locked it up.

They were horrified at the thought of opening the houses.

But eventually, they would give in and they would let you open the house.

I said all you have to do is wear a hoop skirt costume and meet them at the door and be gracious.

That's all you have to do.

We were so surprised that anybody came.

But so many people came, we didn't know what to do with them.

We didn't expect that many.

We were proud of Natchez and proud of the old houses.

- [Woman 12] So we showed them the interior of some of the houses and everybody just went wild about the furniture and the paintings in spite of the dilapidation.

And from then on, everybody wanted to get in the houses.

Didn't care about the garden.

They kind of laughed and said we see gardens.

We have gardens.

But these houses!

And then every year it's just increased, increased year-to-year.

But Natchez brings out in everybody that feeling of love and magnificence and dignity.

So I think Natchez people have revived it, too, from these people that we have met.

so that is one of the things that, to me, is very important: what's inside people, and what comes out.

And it comes out during the Pilgrimage.

- [Man 20] I really feel like Natchez is right on the verge of a Renaissance.

The feeling of growth is practically in the air.

- [Singer] ♪ I said turn to the right.

♪ ♪ You gonna see a little white light.

♪ ♪ That will take you to my... ♪ ♪ Big old blue heaven.

♪ Man, there's going to be big old spotted things.

♪ ♪ And a fireplace, man.

♪ Say maybe a little less.

♪ Down where the roses bloom.

♪ ♪ Molly and me.

♪ Big old baby makes three.

♪ I said want to you to take me to my... ♪ ♪ Whoo!

♪ Big old heaven.

♪ Hit it!

- [Female Singer] ♪ I say from Dixie.

♪ Where the fields of cotton beckon to me.

♪ ♪ I'm glad to see ya.

- [Man 21] Somewhere back along the line, these people, these planters accumulated some money.

And another thing, of course, that helps is not to have too many children, because you take $10 million, if you've got one child, and that child inherits $10 million, he's still got it.

If you've got 10 children, you're already down to just a million a piece, you know?

So that helps.

(Dixieland jazz band plays “Charleston”) - [Man 22] Well I just think that what we should do right now is stop all this talk for a few minutes, and have a little drink, because some of us are really suffering, I think, from all this conversation.