Jackson is the only one of the nation’s state capitals named for a President before its namesake even reached office. Andrew Jackson was still a retired general and six years away from the Presidency when the nascent town in Mississippi was named for him.
The Mississippi General Assembly had been convening in Natchez since the coming of statehood in 1817 and it was decided a state capital was required in the center of Mississippi. Emissaries dutifully rode to the exact center of the state and found a swamp. Scouting around, they inspected to the south and west and came upon LeFleur’s Bluff on the Pearl River, the trading post of French-Canadian adventurer Louis LeFleur. In 1821 the location was officially declared the permanent seat of the Mississippi government and by 1822 the town of Jackson was being laid out in an alternating pattern of commercial-residential blocks and open squares in a style advocated by Thomas Jefferson.
Jackson was a sleepy government burg in its early days, inhabited by only a couple thousand souls but an east-west railroad linked the town to the rest of the South in 1840. Several years later came a route running between Tennessee and New Orleans. These strips or iron rails made the Mississippi capital an attractive target with the coming of the Civil War and twice Union forces captured the town. So much of Jackson burned that it became known as Chimneyville since all that could be seen of the town was brick chimneys poking above the rubble.
Through all of the 19th century commerce and development in the state centered around its towns on the Mississippi River and that did not include Jackson. The city did not see its 10,000th resident until after 1900, about the time the steamboat age was wrapping up on the river. After that it was the age of the railroads and Jackson was uniquely situated to become the commercial capital of Mississippi as well as its government capital.
By 1930 Jackson had sped past Meridian as the state’s largest city and by that time there were fourteen oil derricks pumping around the city which kept money flowing through town even in the Great Depression. The money paid for the state’s best skyscrapers and Art Deco buildings. Our walking tour of the capital city will bump into those and also encounter a few antebellum treasures that made it through the Civil War. But first we will start at a building from a different age, an architectural masterwork that announced to the world that Jackson was coming...
European settlement on these bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River began with the French in 1716. They called their settlement Fort Rosalie but the French never found peace with the Natchez Indians who had built a civilization in the area around ceremonial mounds. The Natchez descended on the French in 1729 and wiped out the French colony, killing 229 men women and children. The French, supported by Indian enemies of the Natchez, systematically destroyed the tribe over the next two years. The Natchez were gone but the French named the town after the vanquished Native Americans.
Great Britain won Natchez after defeating the French in the 1760s and rule passed through Spanish and American hands until all Spanish claims to the land were surrendered to the United States in 1795. The county was named for President John Adams and Natchez was made the first capital of the new Mississippi Territory. The government would soon move to Washington six miles to the east but was back in Natchez in 1817 when Mississippi became the 20th state in the Union. In 1822 the legislature departed for good, to the more centrally located Jackson and after that the townsfolk got down to doing what they did best - making money.
Natchez was a key shipping post on the Mississippi River. Boatmen would float down the river from Kentucky and Ohio and sell their goods and their boats for lumber. Then they would pack up and head back north 500 or so miles on an old buffalo trail that came to be known as the Natchez Trace.
The first planters to the region tried the great Colonial cash crop, tobacco, but it didn’t take. Then they tried cotton. So much cotton was grown and shipped out of Natchez that the town could lay claim to being the wealthiest planters in America. Natchez was hurt by the Civil War but one thing the conflict did not take away was its housing stock. The town surrendered in 1862 and remained in Union hands for the rest of the rebellion. It emerged with more antebellum homes than just about anywhere.
Those mansions remain the backbone of Natchez’s identity. Beginning in 1932 many of the historic homes were opened to visitors in the Spring Pilgrimage. The event has expanded to four weeks when residents and friends connected to the antebellum homes don costumes and greet pilgrims. The doors to natchez don’t have to open for its rich heritage to be on view, as we will discover on our walking tour which will kick off where the town began, on the bluffs atop the Mississippi River...
Newitt Vick was a Methodist minister from Virginia who established one of the first missions in Mississippi in 1814 on land he purchased from the government about six miles east of the the current townsite. While tending to converts Vick also had an eye for business, especially as the nation’s richest cotton-growing lands were being developed around him. He bought up land around the confluence of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers and sketched out plans for a port city. An outbreak of yellow fever claimed both Vick and his wife in 1819 but a son-in-law, John Lane took the plans, sold lots to pay Vick debts and by 1825 had launched a thriving village that was named in the minister’s honor.
Vicksburg was very quickly a bustling port town. In addition to the trade arriving across the docks there were two soap factories, sawmills, carriage and wagon works, and a hospital in town in short order. By 1860 there were five churches, four fire companies and three newspapers in town. When the Civil War erupted Vicksburg was recognized on both sides as “the Gibraltar of the Confederacy.” it took more than a year of military operations and one of the greatest strategic campaigns in American military history, culminating in a six-week siege, to drive the rebels from their fortress of a town. The Vicksburg Campaign made the career of General Ulysses S. Grant and doomed the Confederacy when General John Clifford Pemberton surrendered the town on July 4, 1863.
When the war ended the Vicksburg economy was crippled and much of its building stock damaged or destroyed. Reconstruction in the years following the war did not bring immediate relief. Even the Mississippi River turned against Vicksburg when it cut a new channel and abandoned the waterfront in 1876.
Things began to turn around for Mississippi’s largest city in the 1880s. The Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad arrived in 1884, steamboats filled the Mississippi River and a streetcar system was initiated. The Mississippi River was even brought back by the United States Corps of Engineers with a diversion canal in the Yazoo River.
The boom years subsided after 1910 with the disappearance of the steamboat trade. The population in Vicksburg has changed little in the past 100 years, even as the streetscape has been altered regularly. The town grew up around Main Street but after a fire in 1839 the commercial district shifted down to Washington Street, parallel to the water. Fires visited the downtown area regularly in 1846, 2885, 1910 and 1939, consuming entire blocks. A December 5, 1953 tornado crashed through the business district taking with it numerous long-standing properties in town.
In the 1970s Vicksburg was an active player in urban renewal, pulling down hundreds of buildings. Entire blocks were lost and many buildings left standing picked up unfortunate modern facelifts. Our walking tour to seek out what remains of the character of the historic river town will start, naturally, enough, down by the water...