Forks of the Road

Between 1832 and 1863 Natchez held the second busiest slave market in the Deep South at this corner, where Liberty Road meets D'Evereux Drive a mile east of downtown. Before that, selling people was common on almost every street corner in town. In 1832 fear of cholera led the town council to order the traders outside the city limits, and over the next thirty years tens of thousands of enslaved men, women and children were brought here from Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky and the Carolinas. The Park Service sets the market inside a larger fact: the cotton gin, land vacated by the forced removal of the Chickasaw, and steamboats on the Mississippi made Natchez a center of an economy built on enslaved labor.

The pens did not outlast the war. In the fall of 1863 men of the 12th Wisconsin Infantry and the newly formed 58th United States Colored Troops tore them down for lumber. A letter printed in the Milwaukee Sentinel in January 1864 says many of the soldiers had themselves been sold in those pens and worked through the night to level them.

There is no building to enter. Exhibit panels stand at the corner, and the Park Service, with the City of Natchez, the National Park Foundation and the Friends of the Forks of the Road, began acquiring the site in 2020 and calls it a national site of conscience. Stand a few minutes. Then go on to the William Johnson House and Melrose with this corner in your head.