FORTY YEARS ON GLASS

When thirty-year-old Henry Norman arrived in Natchez, Mississippi, from Kentucky in 1870, determined to become a photographer, the old river city was only a shadow of what it had been before the Civil War. Ante-bellum Natchez was really two towns, each notable in its own way. Down along the Mississippi, on a muddy natural shelf in the shadow of the three-hundred-foot bluffs, lurked Natchez-Under-the-Hill. “For the size of it,” wrote one appalled visitor, “there is not … in the world a more profligate place.” It was a “hell’s broth” of bordellos, gambling dens, saloons, and shanties catering to the appetites of flatboatmen returning upriver with full pockets. Murder was too common to be much remarked upon.

Safe on the breezy heights stood Natchez itself, a frontier town transformed by cotton and steamboats into an international port whose leading citizens led a luxurious, even opulent, existence. A Northerner who made his fortune in Natchez in the 1820’s recalled the pleasures of planter society: “Your coffee in the morning before sunrise; little stews and sudorifics at night, and warm foot baths if you have a cold; bouquets of fresh flowers and mint juleps sent to your apartment.… It is an indolent yet charming life, and one quits thinking and takes to dreaming.” It was said that more millionaires lived in or near Natchez than anywhere else in America except New York. Their fortunes were built on cotton, land, slaves, and credit, and many of their mansions still stand, visited annually by thousands of tourists who shuffle through hoping for at least a glimpse of the moonlight-andmagnolia South.

Natchez emerged from the Civil War physically unscathed, but by the time Norman got there, it was nonetheless in trouble. The war had freed the slaves and destroyed family fortunes; railroads threatened the river trade; soon, thé boll weevil would begin to attack the cotton crop. Natchez-Underthe-Hill already had been tamed by time; Natchez itself had stopped growing—though it still struggled to keep up appearances.

Norman worked as an assistant to an established photographer for a time, nlarried a local girl, then went into business for himself, opening his own studio at 111 Main Street in 1877. Thereafter, for almost four decades, he recorded the daily life of his adopted town.

He didn’t miss much. Norman was infatuated with the camera. He took portraits, of course, thousands of them, but he also delighted in street scenes, parades, ceremonies, news events, and ordinary happenings. Tens of thousands of his glass-plate images survive—the story of their rescue and preservation is told on page 33—and from them Dr. Thomas Gandy, a Natchez physician, and his wife, Joan, have produced a book, H. C. Norman’s Natchez: An Early Photographer and His Town , which will be published in the fall by the University of Mississippi Press. The photographs on this and the following pages, most of them never before published, are drawn from