Judith Sargent Murray

Murray came to Natchez in 1818 to live with her daughter and son-in-law, the planter and lawyer Adam Bingaman, and died two years later. She had long doubted slavery, though like most compatriots she disliked it for corrupting white owners more than for the harm it did to African Americans. In a codicil written the day before she died she asked for a burial spot safe from the invasions of the Planter, a decent railing, and a stone naming her birthplace and parents. Her gravestone in Bingaman Cemetery still says she was a Sargent of Gloucester.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Grand Village of the Natchez Indians — 1.6 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 — 2.6 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.
• Fort Rosalie — 3.3 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.
• Forks of the Road — 3.3 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.

More markers nearby

• Papa Lightfoot — 3.3 mi
• The Forest Plantation — 3.3 mi
• Trinity Episcopal Church — 3.4 mi
• Holy Family Catholic Church — 3.4 mi