Natchez Trails

The domed Federal-style Adams County Courthouse appears in Audubon's 1822-1823 painted landscape of Natchez. Built in 1817, this courthouse in the oldest in Mississippi. It was remodeled in 1925. Actions at the courthouse impacted all of Natchez life. Its historic records include valuable information on marriages, deaths, property sales, land records, and court proceedings. Before the Civil War, the property auctioned by the sheriff in estate sales on the courthouse steps included enslaves people.This 1866 photograph shows Union soldiers sitting on the steps of the Mercer House after the 1863 occupation of the city during the Civil War. Merchant and planter James C. Wilkins built the house about 1815. He served as a territorial representative (1798-1817) and a delegate at the state constitutional convention in 1817. The house later became the Natchez town home of wealthy cotton planter William Newton Mercer. The Baptist Church built two church buildings on the southeast corner of State and South Wall, neither of which survives. The First Baptist Church, pictured above, replaced the antebellum Wall Street Baptist Church, which started a separate chapel for African Americans in 1854. This chapel evolved into the Rose Hill Baptist Church on Madison Street and is the oldest African American



Baptist congregation in Mississippi.Many of the wealthiest Natchez planters and slave owners also were attorneys with offices near the courthouse, Several of them maintained offices in a line of buildings across from the courthouse known as Lawyers Row which became run-down housing before its demolition in the mid-1900s.

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Show me all markers in:  Natchez, MS  |  Adams County  |  39120  |  Mississippi  |  United States of America

William Johnson House
The William Johnson House
Adams County Confederate Memorial, a War Memorial
Intersection of State and South Canal streets
Texada
Intersection of State and South Pearl streets
Intersection of Washington and South Pearl streets
Commercial Bank Building
The First Presbyterian Church
In Gratitude

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