Erosion Imperils Old Mississippi Mansions

History is literally crumbling away in this venerable old Mississippi River town, once the booming capital of a lush cotton kingdom.

Natchez boasts perhaps the best-preserved collection of antebellum Greek Revival mansions in the South. There are more than 300 of them, standing in white-columned splendor along the city’s tree-shaded streets and looking as if the wealthy planters and cotton dealers who built them had just stepped out.

But mud slides are rapidly eroding the foundation on which these architectural treasures are built, the towering red-brown bluff that rises from a narrow table of land along the river.

The 200-foot-high bluff, which gives Natchez a commanding view of the fertile Louisiana lowlands to the west, is composed of a silt-like soil known as “loess” (pronounced LOW-ess). Firm and sturdy when dry, it can erode in heavy rains like a sand castle in the surf.

Mansion Nears Edge

The corner of one prized pre-Civil War mansion, Weymouth Hall, is now only eight feet from the edge of the precipice. When the stately, twin-faced home was built in 1855, the yard ran from that corner for about 90 feet before reaching the bluff.

Local officials and historic preservationists warn that unless something is done, entire neighborhoods of historic buildings may soon face extinction--and with them an irreplaceable part of the nation’s past.

“It’s a very serious problem,” said Bill Fields, chief engineer for the city and surrounding Adams County. “Natchez isn’t suddenly going to disappear from the face of the earth. But we’ve already had loss of life, as well as extensive property damage associated with these slides.”

He was alluding to the collapse five years ago of a rain-sodden section of the bluff near Rosalie, a magnificent 1823 mansion that served as Union Army headquarters during the occupation of Natchez from 1863 to 1865.

That slide sent tons of mud, trees and debris hurtling into a bar and delicatessen at the foot of the bluff.

“My son was tending bar that day,” recalled Andre Farish Sr., owner of the Under-the-Hill Saloon, which suffered $160,000 worth of damage in the incident. “All of a sudden, the whole bar just seemed to cave in as if it had been hit by a battering ram. The only part left standing was the lower portion of the south wall.”

Farish’s son managed to escape unharmed, but two other persons were killed and several more injured.

The historic district at the foot of the bluff is known as Natchez-Under-the-Hill. Popular as a tourist spot, it is the oldest section of the city and was infamous for its gambling halls and brothels during the steamboat era.

On Endangered List

The bar and deli there have since reopened. A new retaining wall has been built, and other measures have been taken to prevent a new slide, but the site remains on the endangered list and is carefully monitored--especially during rainy weather.

Erosion problems are, of course, nothing new to this small city of 22,000, which was first settled by the French in 1716 and is one of the oldest communities on the Mississippi.

“John James Audubon’s journal of 1821 or 1822 mentions a slide going off and taking several homes and people with it,” said Ronald Miller, director of the Historic Natchez Foundation.

Two decades later, William Johnson, a black diarist who was a prominent Natchez barber and businessman, noted that a “large piece of the bluff” had fallen on the road to Natchez-Under-the-Hill. He blamed the slide on reverberations from a cannon salute for a visiting dignitary.

In recent years, the sloughing seems to have accelerated, largely because of an unusually severe streak of wet weather. Rainfall between 1979 and 1984 averaged more than 70 inches in each year--a record high.

“Now, it’s not just the big slide every 25 or 50 years, it’s lots of slides,” Miller said. “The rate of erosion seems to have increased almost geometrically in the past 15 or 20 years.”

Besides Weymouth Hall and Rosalie, other historic places on the endangered list include the Briars, an early-1800s planter’s home where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was married to his second wife; the Parsonage, an 1853 Greek Revival home with unusual parapet walls; and the Smith-Bontura-Evans House, a rare example of a pre-Civil War residence of a free Southern black.

Other Sites Vulnerable

But antebellum homes are not the only ones threatened. Some of the worst erosion is in a neighborhood of charming turn-of-the-century Victorian homes known as Clifton Heights, originally a suburb of wealthy Jewish merchants who dominated Natchez’s economic life after the fall of King Cotton.

In the early 1950s, a 400-foot section of a street along the bluff caved in, reaching right up to the front yard of one palatial Colonial Revival home known as the Learned House. A steel mesh fence and pedestrian barriers were placed around the cavity to keep unsuspecting visitors from tumbling over.

In recent years, the fence had to be extended farther and farther along the bluff as sloughing claimed more and more of the remaining ground on either side of the cave-in.

“I remember waking up one morning two years ago and seeing eight feet of the bluff in front of my house disappear during a rainfall,” said L. Neil Varnell, a clinical psychologist and president of a group of concerned citizens known as Stop Our Slides (SOS). “Until then, I had not been worried about the erosion. But I suddenly realized that this thing was coming after me.”

Varnell is one of the lucky residents of the street: He can still use his front door. Four other families, including residents of the Learned House, must use side or back doors to enter their homes because of the pedestrian barricades.

Oddly enough, a 1946 study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of earth cracks along this same site noted that the fissures had been sealed and concluded that “no more trouble is anticipated at this particular spot.”

The U.S. Park Service, which oversees national historic preservation efforts, is conducting a $1-million study to see what can be done to halt the erosion.

As part of the 18-month project, which is to conclude in September, geologists from the Army Corps of Engineers are examining the 3 1/2-mile length of the bluff--taking soil samples, mapping underground sewer and water lines and testing them for leaks, comparing the present-day bluff line with those shown in 1941 aerial photographs and an 1864 aerial-view map.

The results so far suggest that preserving the bluffs will not be easy.

“What we’re finding is that there is no uniform rate of erosion, so it’s difficult to predict what might go next,” said George L. Hunt Jr., the chief corps geologist on the project. “In most cases, the retreat has been about 30 to 50 feet over the past 120 years.”

However, he added: “I would feel very uncomfortable sleeping in that house eight feet from the edge of the bluff when it’s raining.”

Hunt also said the investigation indicates that Mother Nature is not solely to blame for the mud slides. Leaky storm sewers, water lines and old cisterns seem to have played a role too, he said.

The corps is turning its data over to a private consulting firm in St. Louis that is to draw up recommendations for action. But Hunt despairs that any workable--and affordable--solution can be found.

“There are just all kinds of problems that you have to deal with,” he said. “For example, it’s incomprehensible that you would try to do something to the entire bluff, but, then again, anything piecemeal is not going to hold together for long.”

But those Natchezians in the forefront of the battle to block the erosion are not so pessimistic--although they concede that cost alone might forestall any full-scale assault on the problem.

In the spirit of the river boat gamblers who stamped a large imprint on this town, they are willing to bet the limit until their cards run out.

“Many, many tourists and historians come to our city because they want to see the unique way of life that is preserved here,” said Fields, the city and county engineer. “We may not be able to change what nature has in store for the bluffs eventually, but if we can, we’d like to delay it for 100 or 200 years.”