Natchez National Historical Park

Natchez, on the bluffs above the Mississippi River, is one of the earliest European settlements in the lower Mississippi River Valley. Its origins date to 1716, when French settlers built Fort Rosalie on the bluffs, and in 1789 the Spanish governor Manuel Gayoso de Lemos ordered the survey of its street grid. The city is known for historic architecture spanning three centuries, and Natchez National Historical Park includes two contrasting sites. Melrose, a Greek Revival mansion completed in 1848, offers a glimpse into the lives of a pre-Civil War cotton planter's family and of the enslaved people who worked on the estate. The William Johnson House was built by a prosperous barber and free man of color, using bricks from buildings destroyed in the tornado of 1840. Johnson's meticulous 16-year diary chronicles his life as a free man of color in a slave society, and the house now tells the story of free African Americans in the antebellum South.

In 2014, CyArk and Trimble partnered to document Melrose and the William Johnson House as a pilot project for an Atlantic Slave Trade theme, an interactive experience intended to complement the continued study of slavery in the Atlantic world.