Forks of the Road Slave Market Site

The Forks of the Road is a quiet intersection on the east side of Natchez that was, for three decades before the Civil War, one of the most consequential and brutal sites in American history. The slave market operated here continuously from around 1833, and the volume of transactions — entire families separated, individuals sold to distant plantations — was enormous by any measure.

A National Park Service memorial now marks the site, with interpretive panels and a planned expanded commemoration. The physical remains of the market are gone, but the memorial visit is sobering and important context for everything else you see in Natchez. The Forks of the Road site is essential viewing alongside the mansion tours — it explains what financed the houses.

things to do sight history
A story
The Forks of the Road was the second-largest slave market in the antebellum United States, after New Orleans. Between roughly 1833 and 1863, tens of thousands of enslaved people were bought and sold here — transported from the Upper South by the domestic slave trade and auctioned to cotton planters across the Mississippi River Delta. For much of the nineteenth century, the site was simply unacknowledged.

Other places in Things to Do