G. Douglas Adams
Don Estes, the man who wrote the book—literally—on the Natchez Cemetery.
Tickets on sale now for our October 21 Supper Club with Chef Nathan Gresham at Sunset View Cottages.
“The Most Interesting Cemetery in the South” is a bold label to live up to—a lot of interesting people have died down here, many of them in interesting ways—but Natchez City Cemetery lives up to its boast. The great, the good, the memorable, and the strange of Natchez are all interred in this multi-denominational, multi-racial burying ground. Lush with crepe myrtles and oaks and filled with elegantly carved monuments, the cemetery would be beautiful even without its patina of history and glamour.
Natchez avoided the prolonged artillery hammering by land and sea that upriver Vicksburg endured, but the cemetery, full of Confederate veterans (and the odd Union sympathizer) still commemorates the war that so battered the South. Natchez’s lone direct casualty from Union fire, a seven-year-old girl hit during a punitive artillery barrage from Federal gunboats, rests on Jewish Hill, under a stone bilingual in English and Hebrew. She’s not the only child at rest in the cemetery; those of a spiritual bent may hope her shade plays with that of Florence Irene Ford, a ten-year-old who died of yellow fever in 1871. Florence had been so afraid of the dark that her grave was constructed with a window over her face and a few steps leading down, so her grieving mother could read and sing to her departed daughter.
These sad stories are joined by a few amusing ones, provided you’re willing to laugh a bit at the Reaper. One headstone reads simply “Louise the Unfortunate”—this would seem to go without saying, given the context. The local sex worker buried below refused to give her last name to anyone, and so simply Louise she remained. An apparently leisure-loving local worthy named Rufus Case rests beneath a squat pyramid—per his instructions, he was buried upright in a rocking chair. And a daunting mortar slab defends the grave of the “Yellow Duchess” Katherine Lintot Minor, widow of the last Spanish governor of Natchez, because she feared her notorious love of gold would tempt grave robbers.
Tours and special programs occur regularly at the cemetery, and guests at the October Supper Club will have the opportunity to join a private, specially designed tour of the cemetery. Pick up a copy of Don Estes’ Legends of the Natchez City Cemetery beforehand for an engaging and heavily illustrated guide, and prepare for an adventure with some of the most fascinating people you’ll ever regret not meeting.
Tickets on sale now for our October 21 Supper Club with Chef Nathan Gresham at Sunset View Cottages.
