LOUISE.
THE UNFORTUNATE.
There was a lot of unfortunate in Natchez back when. You didn’t have to be murdered by a greedy neighbor or shelled by a Union gunboat to die before your time, as another marker near Louise’s attests: It commemorates Joseph Eisley’s wife and five children, all of whom died of yellow fever within one week in 1853. When Eisley himself passed away, 39 years later, someone chiseled his name, in a humbler font, at the bottom of that long list.
As for Louise, she worked down by the river, where unfortunate dwelt in abundance. While most of Natchez rests atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, one neighborhood, at its base, is known as Natchez-under-the-Hill. Today it’s just a few blocks of gift shops and fun-but-not-too-raucous pubs; back in the day, though, it was much larger, with a rather colorful reputation. As Joseph Holt Ingraham, a New Englander who visited Natchez in the early 1830s, wrote in his 1835 account “The South-West, by a Yankee”:
“Like the celebrated “Five Points” in New-York, ‘Natchez under the Hill,’ as it has been aptly named, has extended its fame throughout the United States, in wretched rhyme and viler story. For many years it has been the nucleus of vice upon the Mississippi.”
Steamships were constantly docking at and shipping out from the landings at Natchez-under-the-Hill. The streets were lined with grog shops, gambling dens and bordellos, and teemed at all hours with stevedores, sailors, gangs and thieves. And prostitutes.
No one knows where Louise came from or how she ended up in Natchez, but at some point, she fell gravely ill — likely with consumption — and a number of her co-workers implored a Presbyterian minister, Joseph Buck Stratton, to pay her a call. “I would have shrunk from it,” Mr. Stratton wrote in his diary in May 1849, “but the friends wished me to be with them and I stayed for their good and my own, to see the Prostitute die … it was a death that gives no tangible ground for hope.”
Mr. Stratton buried Louise and commissioned her stone. It’s not known how many others like her are interred throughout the cemetery. Most, it is presumed, have no marker at all.
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2I30JyT
0 Comments