In the summer of 2003 I was one of a group of graduate history students from California State University Northridge to participate in the Natchez Court House Records Project, soon followed up by speaking at the bi-annual Natchez Historic conference in 2004. Many of my first impressions of Natchez, my fellow students and the founder of the project, Dr. Ron Davis, still linger in my mind, reflecting the comforts and contradictions of the Deep South as seen from my own middle class background. In Theory the task given to us was very simple, take-up a massive 30 pound court house Chattel Mortgage Contract ledger from the Reconstruction era, Scribner the court clerks handwriting on the pages to find the content and enter that information into a form destined to go into a computer data base. In time this would give a priceless record of the rise of sharecropping in the Natchez district, with key family and financial data, keeping a new generation of Genealogists and historians busy for decades to come. In the photo below I am trying to look like I know what I am doing-I did not fool anyone.
Two of the real old hands at reading the old documents in the room were
Tony Seybert on the right and Aaron Anderson, below. Seybert's Thesis work is on the Southern
Press, before the Civil War. He has worked at the CSUN newspaper the Sundial, edits a Blog,
at http://mushtown.blogspot.com,
helps teach some of the history Survey Courses as a Teachers Assistant and
runs the History Resource room for the department. oh, and is writing his
Thesis. In his "spare" time, no doubt. Aaron Anderson's work on the
documents makes my eyes water just hearing about it. To date he has logged
some one thousand records in his own work dealing with the local
Post-Bellum Jewish Merchants. In the end, he bought his own place to live
in Natchez. As events turned out, he has more records to look at in
nearby Concordia Parrish, just over the Mississippi river. Rumor has it
that Anderson will going to the University of southern Mississippi this
summer for his Ph.D. The photo below shows the records room at the Adams
County Courthouse, with Mr. Anderson at the table and Dr. Ron Davis in the
background.
Not all of the documents were the massive tomes like the Chattel Mortgage
books, some of the most compelling files are the court papers dealing with
trial charges and outcomes. These were found by preservation advocates in
the basement of the Natchez court house, the city being the county seat of
Adams County. The files and "The Box they came in" were moved nearby to an
old school that is now the headquarters for the Historic Natchez Foundation. The
Foundation provides the room and housing for the grad students to live and
work in. In a tour of the Foundaiton the students often see the old filing
system the court records were kept in. In the photo below the color
ribbons are used to mark each year of the work done by the on-going
project. The records taken out of the rust-bound files are placed in large
walk-in Vaults at the Foundation and kept in Archival, acid-free boxes.
The records that came out of old court file cabinets had far more drama
than the records that dealt with sharecropping, but in may ways were much
harder to understand due to both the legal conventions of the documents
and the need to train-up my eyes to read the 19th century cursive
penmanship of the court clerk. One formula indictment would be to describe
someones motivation, such as Mr. /Miss/Mrs. (fill in name of the accused)
being under the influence of the Devil did commit (fill in the crime).
Another thing to look for was the drawing of the court seal as a kind of
curly cue squiggle. I often wonder at the work of some of the court
clerks, you could tell the clear handwriting from the not so clear, and
hope that veterans of the Project would put a wreath every year on the
grave of the men who did a great job just to say thanks. The odds are that
many of the men who worked in the courthouse are buried at the Natchez
City Cemetery. It is a nice idea, and I do hope we do it some day, but
given the short amout of time each year the project is running, I don't
see it happening all that soon. The photo below will give you some idea of
what a court case might look like.
In the next few weeks I will "post" a few more notes on the project, and NOT leave out the women who also have gone on to Ph.D. programs, the places we would stay like the Bluff Top, and what happened to start my own Obsession with the impact of World War I The Great War on the little county seat of Natchez, Mississippi.