The Forest Plantation

William Dunbar is remembered as a scientist, but the Forest ran on enslaved labor. At his earlier plantation near Baton Rouge he kept a diary about his efforts to control Jamaican-born enslaved people. After settling at the Forest in Spanish Natchez, he built a fortune partly by trading enslaved people and growing tobacco, rice, indigo and sugar. Much of his wealth came from barrel staves: enslaved workers turned white and red oak into finished staves in a single operation, moving from stand to stand, and the staves went downriver to New Orleans for the West Indies trade.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grand Village of the Natchez Indians — 4.1 mi
  The Natchez capital on St. Catherine Creek, where the Great Sun lived, with two mounds rebuilt to the shape the French recorded in 1723.
• Melrose Estate — 5.5 mi
  A Greek Revival estate in Natchez, now a National Park Service site, interpreted through the people who were enslaved there as well as the McMurran family.
• Forks of the Road — 6.2 mi
  The 1832-1863 slave market a mile east of downtown Natchez, the second busiest in the Deep South, now a Natchez National Historical Park site with exhibit panels.
• Fort Rosalie — 6.6 mi
  The bluff where the French built Fort Rosalie in 1716 and the Natchez attacked it in 1729, now a free Natchez National Historical Park site beside the southern end of the Natchez Trace.

More markers nearby

• Judith Sargent Murray — 3.3 mi
• Papa Lightfoot — 6.3 mi
• Holy Family Catholic Church — 6.5 mi
• Trinity Episcopal Church — 6.6 mi