Mimi Miller on Natchez Historic Sites
Mimi Miller's Nominees for:
Favorite Natchez Historic Sites
FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Built 1828-29, is the finest Federal style church building in Mississippi and features a preserved interior complete with pew doors. The frugal Scots also preserved their original clear glass windows. The church also offers a photographic gallery with over five hundred historic images of Natchez as it looked between 1850 and 1950.
NATCHEZ CITY CEMETERY
Combines history, art, architecture, and landscape in one spectacular site overlooking the Mississippi River. Open daily from dawn to dusk, the cemetery's paved roads make it a popular destination for walkers, joggers and bikers. The cemetery includes people of all races, all religions, and most national origins. Make plans early for the November night-time performances of Angels on the Bluff, because tickets sell out quickly.
ST. MARY BASILICA
Built 1842, is the grandest Gothic Revival building in Mississippi and has most of the bells and whistles visitors expect to find in historic European churches. The antebellum Gothic interior is richly painted and ornamented and the church has a significant collection of late nineteenth-century stained-glass windows.
TRINITY EPISCOPAL CHURCH
Built 1822, was originally a Federal style church but was remodeled in 1838. Episcopalians are stylish and must have sensed that the Greek Revival style was going to be all the rage. Louis Comfort Tiffany of New York made two of the stained-glass windows, memorials to the Aldrich and Koontz families. Glass artist John Lafarge, a Tiffany rival, made the window in the apse.
WILLIAM JOHNSON HOUSE
Creatively interpreted by the National Park Service. The house museum includes both exhibits and period rooms with original Johnson furnishings. Born a slave and later freed by his owner, William Johnson became a successful businessman. He earned a place in American history by keeping a daily diary, published by LSU, that represents the most complete account of the life of a free African American in the antebellum South.
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Mimi Miller is Executive Director of the Historic Natchez Foundation and has worked for the Foundation since 1992. She previously worked as an architectural historian and local government assistance coordinator for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and as a preservation consultant. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Mimi and her husband Ron Miller moved to Natchez in 1973. Their scholarship in the fields of architecture, decorative arts, and Natchez history has been collaborative and both have lectured widely. They co-authored the Great Houses of Natchez and the Historic Natchez Foundation's Walking Guide to the Old Town. Mimi has prepared approximately 130 successful National Register nominations in Mississippi and Louisiana, 12 National Register Districts, and prepared almost two hundred successful applications for tax-assisted rehabilitations.
"Natchez is famous for its mansion houses and grand interiors that reflect the city's booming cotton economy between 1800 and 1860. Visitors flock, and well they should, into famous mansions like Magnolia Hall, Melrose, Rosalie, and Stanton Hall, all of which retain substantial collections of original decorative arts. And the most famous of all the Natchez mansions is the unfinished Longwood, whose constructed was halted by the Civil War.
If you have visited Natchez several times and think you have seen it all, I have a few recommendations for another visit, and first time visitors need to expand their itineraries to include some of my favorite, non-mansion places. Believe it or not, not one of these favorite places charges an admission fee."