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 at that time were Tony Seybert on the right and Aaron Anderson, below. Seybert's Thesis work was on the Southern Press, before the Civil War. He found that street fights and duels were not unheard of for newspaper men in the deep South. He worked at the CSUN newspaper the Sundial, (still edits a blog), he also helped teach some of the history Survey Courses as a Teachers Assistant and ran the History Resource room for the department at the time. oh, and finnished his Thesis. In his "spare" time, no doubt. Last I heard of Tony he was working as a newspaper reporter in a small town. To date no one has challenged him to a Duel.
Aaron Anderson's work on the documents make my eyes water just hearing about it. Anderson has logged thousands of 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, and started loging records in nearby Concordia Parrish. Mr. Anderson is now going to the University of southern Mississippi 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 provided the room for the grad students to 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 steel files and placed in acid-free folders and 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.
The places we lived in at the time, like the Victorian Bluff Top, were also full of the local history. It was in this setting that my own obsession with the impact of World War I on Natchez took root.
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