Bluff Park and South Broadway Street

Bontura, built in 1851, was the home of Robert Smith, a free African American who ran the city’s most successful carriage business in the 1850s. The house stands at the head of Silver Street, which leads to Natchez Under-the-Hill. Smith and his drivers met the steamboats and flatboats that provided a steady stream of business in passengers and freight. Smith was one of a small number of free African Americans who were economically successful but lived under restrictions due to race. After Smith’s death in 1858, Joseph Bontura bought the property and carriage business and enlarged the house into an inn for river travelers. The Henderson Cotton Warehouse, built in 1852 for planter and cotton merchant Thomas Henderson, is the earliest surviving industrial building in Natchez. Later enlarged and remodeled, its late 1800s front includes a series of store doors beneath a second story of decorative pressed metal, while the side facing Broadway Street resembles its pre-Civil War appearance. In 1905, the Mississippi State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution decided to recognize the historic importance of the Natchez Trace by placing historic markers in every Mississippi county along its route, and dedicated the Adams County marker at a ceremony on the bluff in 1909. This early effort to recognize the historic road was one of several that led to the 1938 creation of the Natchez Trace Parkway as a unit of the National Park Service, and soon after, DAR members gathered in a second ceremony to acknowledge the first funds for the parkway. The Bridge of Sighs arches over Roth Hill Road, which intersects Bluff Park and runs from the foot of Main Street to the waterfront below. The bridge took its name from the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, which was named by Lord Byron and later the title of a famous poem by Thomas Hood. Artist and engineer William Marshall Merrick sketched the bridge in 1855, and it appears in historic photographs until about 1920.

Vidalia, Louisiana · United States