Natchez City Cemetery

When Natchez opened this cemetery on the bluff in 1822, it divided the ground into four sections: for Roman Catholics, for strangers, for people of color, and for white people in general. The city had bought the land from John Steel for $1,000 and moved remains here from an older burial ground beside what is now St. Mary Basilica. About 10,000 graves are marked, among them John A. Quitman's and steamboat man Thomas Leathers's, and a turning angel stands over five young women killed in a 1908 explosion at the Natchez Drug Company.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture — 1.1 mi
  A museum in the old 1904 post office on Main Street, opened in 1991, covering slavery, Reconstruction and the Natchez civil rights movement.
• William Johnson House — 1.2 mi
  The brick home and shop block of a free Black barber and diarist in Natchez, who enslaved others himself and was shot by a neighbor in 1851.
• Forks of the Road — 1.5 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 — 1.5 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

• Birthplace of Jackson State University — steps away
• Richard Wright — 0.6 mi
• Andrew Marschalk — 1.0 mi
• Natchez Burning — 1.1 mi