When we left Hot Springs this Fall, our next destination was Mississippi, which, like Arkansas, would be a new state for us. (We had taken a side trip into the state in 2004, but this would be the first time we'd had the RV there.) We planned to stay in Natchez, but it turned out that our RV Park was in Vidalia, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River. (We did actually stay a couple of nights in Mississippi, on the way to Natchez/Vidalia and after our stay there.) This barge is going right past our Vidalia front door -- looking across to Natchez. The whole area around Natchez-Vidalia is called "Miss Lou", which sounds to me like it should be the name of somebody's sweet Southern Aunt. Half of the businesses in and near the two towns are called Miss Lou something or other.
The main reason we wanted to stay in Natchez was to explore part of The Natchez Trace Parkway. The Trace is a living monument to the history of people on the move. It is built along what were paths for Choctaw Indians that eventually came to form a trail from the Mississippi River into the valley of Tennessee.
Around 1780, farmers found they could build boats and float their crops and products downriver to the good markets of Natchez or New Orleans. Then, instead of taking the empty flatboat back up the River, they would sell it as lumber. But then they would have to hike back home. So they used the Indian paths and with frequent use, the paths eventually evolved into the Trace (trail). The picture above was taken from the bottom of the trace--in places it was worn into an eight to ten foot deep "ditch."
This is Mount Locust, one of the oldest structures still standing on the Trace. Built as a family plantation, it was one of the first to open its doors to travelers. Food and accomodations for the night cost about 25 cents.
We only had time to explore a few miles of the Trace, but you can drive it from Natchez to Nashville, almost 450 miles. Maybe someday we will be able to do that. It was interesting that this long Parkway, with so much of historical interest, is only designated as a national historical area, while back in Arkansas, Hot Springs, just a few blocks long, is a National Park.
While visiting Miss Lou, we also toured Frogmore Plantation (on the Louisiana side of the border). This 1800-acre working cotton plantation has been operating since the early 1800s. Part of it is kept as it was in the early 1800s, including slave row cabins and assorted plantation buildings, called dependencies. These included barns, cane mills, butcheries and other buildings necessary to keep the plantation
going. This is from the inside of a slave cabin, looking out at the fields where they would have worked.
This tour wasn't exactly a fun and relaxing afternoon, but it is a relatively painless way to sort of experience this history. You have to commend the owners for keeping a portion of their property the way it used to be, so that the era won't be forgotten. It was easy to imagine what it must have been like back then. The tour also touched on reconstruction and the sharecropping era, which wasn't a barrel of laughs either.
Cotton Gin
Cane Mill
Scales for bales
If we had gotten there a little earlier in the season, we would also have seen the current cotton ginning process, but it was the very end of the harvest season, so the action was just about over for the year. There was still some cotton growing though. We learned that cotton is a member of the hibiscus family and that when it first blossoms it is pink.