A Place That Deserves to Be Seen: The Forks of the Road

Today I added a new Place to the website: The Forks of the Road in Natchez, Mississippi.

I have also added a recent article to the What’s Happening section of the website, “I Was Sold at the Forks of the Road,” by Alan Huffman. It takes an in-depth look at what is now happening at the site, including the National Park Service’s efforts to give this enormously important place a much more substantial presence.

For decades, the physical presence of the Forks of the Road has seemed almost impossibly small compared with the scale of what happened there.

Beginning in the 1830s, the Forks became one of the largest centers of the domestic slave trade in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved men, women, and children passed through the trading district at Natchez. Yet for generations, someone could drive through the intersection without realizing the significance of the ground beneath them.

That is finally beginning to change.

This summer, the National Park Service (NPS) unveiled new interpretive markers at the site. More is planned. The former church on the property, now called Freedom Hall, is expected to house additional exhibits, and the NPS hopes to eventually to create a museum while continuing to acquire property from willing sellers within the authorized historic area. The larger effort has also involved the National Park Foundation, the Trust for Public Land, the Archaeological Conservancy, the City of Natchez, and others.

And it is important to recognize that this moment did not happen overnight. Local activist Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-C.M. Boxley spent decades pushing for the Forks of the Road to be recognized and interpreted more fully, long before the site received the federal attention it has today.

I am genuinely happy to see this happening. When I visited the site last year, I had mixed emotions about what I saw. While I was grateful for what was there, it was disheartening to see people pull to the side of the road, look at it from their car, and then drive off. These new additions that are being planned will hopefully encourage people to leave their vehicles and engage more deeply with a place that carries such powerful stories and lessons.

Historic preservation is not only about saving beautiful buildings, or places where battles occurred or where famous people once stood. Sometimes the places we most need to preserve are ones that force us to address difficult topics. They ask us to confront people whose lives were controlled by others, families torn apart for profit, men, women, and children forced to live and work under brutal conditions, and the deep and lasting trauma inflicted by a system that treated human beings as property.

Considering the national importance of the Forks of the Road, giving visitors a place where they can truly understand what happened there is long overdue.

And I am very glad to see that work finally moving forward.