Saturday In Natchez

Forgot to tell you about the single barrel whiskey when we were at the Jack Daniels distillery. They offer  a special single barrel edition which essentially means that each bottle is not blended with any other barrels - each bottle is numbered and marked to identify which barrel it comes from so if you find one you like you can order another one from the same batch - it is very expensive but it is the best. Anyway a few years ago some one ordered a whole barrel and sent it to Team 6 Navy Seals - they were the boys that took out Bin Laden - rumor is that the order came direct from the White House!

We spent the day taking a gander round Natchez - there are a lot of antebellum homes here ( it means pre war - in this case it's the Civil War)

This particular one was started a few years before the war in 1861 but the inside was never finished apart from the ground floor - so inside it looks like this atrium 

The chap that owned it - Haller Nutt - died a couple of years later and the house was never completed but his widow and her 8 children lived there for the rest of their lives

We moved on to a cotton plantation

I didn't know much about cotton - in fact I've never seen a cotton plant before

We were shown round by the lady that owns this place - it's still a working, producing plantation.

The place had around 150 slaves working in the 1800's - they would pick the cotton off the plant and once they have picked a sack full - about 50lbs they start all over again - they worked from dawn to dusk. The seeds would then have to be removed from the cotton - very difficult - I couldn't do it - it would be done by the children - before a machine was invented to automate it.

The return on an acre for the plantation owner was about $40 - that was around 5 times more than any other crop - also cotton was fairly easy to grow and the crop rarely failed so that meant that everyone wanted to start a plantation so you had a lot of reasonably wealthiy people like bankers and lawyers buying up plantations and moving south - and they became even wealthier. But when the Civil War started it was game over for a lot of these plantations - the cotton crop were seized and the ports were blockaded so it couldn't be exported. Also a lot of their slaves took the opportunity to escape and join the Union.

Sunset over the Mississippi 

We're heading down to Lafayette tomorrow - more Cajun and swampy than this bit - should be interesting.