Forks of the Road

The Forks of the Road is the site of the South's second largest slave market in the 19th century. Enslaved people were also once sold on city streets and at the landing at Natchez Under the Hill. Natchez slaves were freed in July, 1863, when Union troops occupied the city. The Forks of the Road market then became a refuge for hundreds of emancipated people.

In the decades prior to the American Civil War, market places where enslaved Africans were bought and sold could be found in every town of any size in Mississippi. Natchez was the state’s most active slave trading city.

Natchez played a significant role in the southward movement of the existing slave population to the waiting cotton plantations of the Deep South. Slave sales at Natchez were held in a number of locations, but one market place soon eclipsed the others in the number of sales. This was the market known as “The Forks of the Road,” located at the busy intersection of Liberty Road and Washington Road about one mile east of downtown Natchez. (Today, Washington Road is named “D’Evereux Drive,” which changes to “St. Catherine Street” at the Liberty Road intersection.) The market site occupied a prominent knoll, straddling what was then the city's eastern corporation line.

A distinctive characteristic of the Forks of the Road slave market was the manner in which sales were transacted. New England writer Joseph Holt Ingraham, who visited the Forks of the Road slave market about 1834, wrote, “[Slaves at the Forks of the Road] are not sold at auction, or all at once, but singly, or in parties, as purchasers may be inclined to buy.” Likewise, classified advertisements placed by Forks of the Road slave traders in Natchez newspapers simply announced the availability of slaves for purchase, indicating a casual, first-come-first-served approach to marketing slaves. Lacking the competitive, public spectacle atmosphere of an auction, individual buyers and sellers were free to quietly strike a bargain.

The last newspaper advertisements for slave sales at the Forks of the Road appeared in the Natchez Daily Courier during the early months of 1863. All slave trading had ceased in Natchez by the summer of 1863 when Union troops occupied the town. Today, the historic intersection, with its familiar “Y” configuration, remains to mark the location of the once-flourishing slave markets at the Forks of the Road.

(This article is condensed from an article originally written by Jim Barnett and Clark Burkett published in The Journal of Mississippi History, Volume LXIII, Fall 2001, No. 3.)