Natchez Trails
The
Yazoo and Mississippi Valley
Railroad built the passenger station on
the bluff shortly after 1910, and the
Illinois Central Railroad was the last
railroad to own it. Like many smal
towns across America, Natchez lost
passenger service as the Automobile
Age reached full maturity. By the end
of World War II, passenger trains no
longer stopped in Natchez. Abandoned
railroad stations have been a primary
focus of "adaptive reuse," a
preservation movement to use old
buildings for purposes other than
those originally intended. This station
became a restaurant in the mid-1970s.About 1890, grocers and cotton factors
Samuel Geisenberger and Joseph
Friedler built a large warehouse
adjacent to the railroad on Broadway
Street. Both were second generation
Jewish businessmen. Callon Petroleum
Company bought the historic
Geisenberger and Friedler building
added a third story, and renovated
the building to serve as company
headquarters in the mid-1980s.The
Natchez Cotton Mill, built in 1872,
sat on the site of the hotel built in 2007
that faces Broadway, and the nearby
Rosalie Cotton Mill soon followed. The
mills reflected local efforts to expand
the region's economy beyond
growing and ginning cotton to
manufacturing cotton. These efforts
also included cotton seed
oil mills. In
1887, a boiler explosion killed five
workers in the Natchez Cotton Mill.
Neither of the downtown cotton mills
exist today, but the small houses built
for workers survive in the area of
Madison, North Wall, and Maple
Streets. The 1907 arrival of the boll
weevil and the Great Depression ended
the city''s efforts to develop cotton
industries.The
Natchez Rotary Club installed the fountain in the Bluff Park in 1969 in honor of the club's fiftieth anniversary.
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