Selling Historic Natchez to Depression-Era Pilgrims

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.

Memory Making on Parade

This chapter clarifies that black communities experienced emancipation traditions in different ways. Given the large proportion of blacks in Natchez, and the region’s well-established free black community, it seemed probable that Natchez would experience a robust emancipation tradition. That was not the case. The grand 1867 Fourth of July parade in Natchez organized by the Union League drew a large crowd of African Americans, suggesting the beginnings of a bold emancipation tradition. Instead, public emancipation celebrations dwindled. By the time of the 1871 Decoration Day observance, leaders stressed reconciliation and a tribute to Confederate as well as Union soldiers, a far different message heard only four years earlier. The erosion of a black emancipation tradition resulted from the unusually close ties that existed between Natchez free blacks and white elites, and the fear among free blacks that it was in their best political interests to suppress such traditions.

Forging New Identities in a World Gone Mad

This chapter recounts the turmoil endured by black and white Natchez women and men during the Civil War and Union occupation, and how these experiences shaped historical memories of the war. Mississippi’s economy lay in ruins with nearly a quarter of the white males who served in the Confederate Army killed in action or perishing from wounds or disease at war’s end, while white civilians faced poverty, military loss, and a racial hierarchy turned upside down. Natchez’s large African-American population majority faced their own challenges but found sustenance in black churches and schools organized by the American Missionary Association during Reconstruction. Natchez had all the makings for a complex set of historical memories: great wealth, followed by profound loss, a paternalistic planter class, a sizable free black community that did not always sympathize with former slaves, and a massive formerly enslaved labor force discovering freedom for the first time.

Natchez Today

The epilogue explores recent expressions of historical memory in Natchez. The efforts of the National Park Service, the Historic Natchez Foundation and the Natchez Courthouse Records Project have set in motion progressive changes hardly imaginable a few decades ago. These include a growing number of Pilgrimage home tours that acknowledge the contributions of enslaved laborers, funding to interpret the Forks of the Road slave market site, and the Natchez Trails project that depicts a more racially inclusive history throughout downtown streets and neighborhoods. But even as these developments signal important steps forward, some efforts falter amid contestation. For most of its lifespan, Natchez’s white victors wrote its history. Today that history is beginning to be re-imagined and rewritten by a small group of liberal whites and vocal black agents pushing for long overdue change. Hopefully, Natchez’s example will prompt other southern communities to examine, re-imagine and more accurately share their own local histories.

The Battle of the Hoopskirts

This chapter details the courtroom battle that erupted in 1941 between the Natchez Garden Club and Pilgrimage Garden Club, dubbed by the media as “The Battle of the Hoopskirts.” The dispute began when the rival clubs clashed over overlapping home tour schedules. But much more was at stake than a heated court hearing to determine tour dates. The clubwomen of Natchez were battling for the control and spoils of their town’s cultural image. The issue was not so much a differing definition of the past as much as a conflict over who would control the presentation of that past and the marked differences in lifestyles and ideals that polarized the warring factions. The opposing clubs agreed on the end product—a highly romanticized, whitewashed image of the Old South mirrored by popular culture of the era but differed on the management of that past as a marketable commodity.