Forks of the Road Historical Site

From the 1830s until early 1863, Forks of the Road in Natchez was the center of one of the nation’s busiest slave-trading districts, where enslaved African Americans were housed, displayed, bought, and sold in markets and compounds at the fork of Liberty Road and St. Catherine Street. The site stood at a major junction in the largest forced migration of labor in American history, as more than 750,000 enslaved people were moved between 1800 and 1860 from the upper South to the lower South through an interstate trading network shaped by the closing of the international slave trade after 1808 and by expanding cotton and sugar agriculture. Traders purchased enslaved people in places such as Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky and sent them south by ship, riverboat, or overland coffles, while many of the enslaved resisted being sold south because of family separation and harsher conditions. Natchez became an especially important market after an 1833 city ordinance pushed traders out of the city and they established slave pens, showrooms, and inspection yards here, though Mississippi’s ban on out-of-state slaves, enforced in 1837, temporarily curtailed the trade until repeal in 1846. By 1856 the trading district had spread onto adjoining St. Catherine Street. The last sales occurred in early 1863, shortly before the U.S. Army occupied Natchez, bringing the Emancipation Proclamation and ending slavery in the area. Freedpeople then settled near the site, and in 1863 the 58th Regiment of U.S. Colored Infantry occupied the Forks, a place where some of its soldiers may once have been held for sale.

Natchez, Mississippi · United States