The United States Courthouse, previously known as Institute Hall, Opera Hall, and Memorial Hall, is a building in Natchez, Mississippi that was initially constructed from 1851 to 1853, for use as an educational building. It has served a variety of public purposes in the intervening years. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. In 2007, it was rededicated as a courthouse of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Building history
The cornerstone for the United States Courthouse, originally known as Institute Hall, was laid in 1852. The president of the Natchez Board of Education stated at the cornerstone laying ceremony that it would "serve as a monument to the past showing what can be accomplished in a few years by willing hearts and ready hands. It will be a beacon in the future, calling for deeds to emulate the past". The building was built by the Weldon Brothers. The building was completed in 1853 and intended to serve as a place for events and performances related to the adjacent Natchez Institute school. It opened on Independence Day that year. The building quickly became the city's entertainment venue, hosting traveling acts and local celebrations. By the 1890s, newspapers called the building Opera Hall. (It had briefly doubled as a roller rink.) In 1901 the basement-level girls' classrooms were relocated to the new building of the Natchez Institute. That same year, a new concert hall opened in the city, and Opera Hall attracted few events.
In 1921, the American Legion refashioned the building as a World War I monument, adding a proscenium stage and patriotic decor. In 1924, they added four bronze plaques with the names of World War I veterans and two descriptive plaques, and the structure was renamed Memorial Hall. The newly renamed building continued to serve a wide variety of purposes for the city throughout the twentieth century. It was a teen canteen, a library, a charity clothing drop-off center, a museum, an American Legion hall, a place for the city to store voting booths, a location for boxing matches, and it occasionally still hosted public performances. One notable use began in 1932, as the first pageant was held in Memorial Hall during the Natchez Pilgrimage, the nation's second oldest organized house tour.
By the 1970s, the building was in a decaying condition. In 1987, the Historic Natchez Foundation, working with the city, purchased the dilapidated building, began emergency repairs, and waited for a preservation-supportive occupant.
Changing US courts needs led the US District courts to relocate a court to Natchez. Through a partnership involving federal, state, and local agencies working closely with Waggonner & Ball Architects, Memorial Hall was rehabilitated for use as a federal courthouse. In 2007, Natchez once again was the site of a federal court. More than 200 years earlier, it had a federal courthouse when it was the capital of the Mississippi Territory.
Report on 1924 World War I plaques
On March 14, 2010, the Natchez Democrat reported that the names of more than 500 black servicemen from Adams County in World War I had been excluded from the memorial plaques, which were installed in 1924 during an extended period of state racial segregation, at what is now the US Courthouse. Shane Peterson, a student at California State University Northridge, had researched the issue and published a paper online; he found that a federal roster shows that 581 black men entered the U.S. Army from Adams County between 1917 and 1918, and approximately 200 of the veterans returned to Adams County after the war, yet none is listed on the courthouse plaques.
Peterson contacted Ser Seshs Ab Heter-C.M. Boxley, a local activist and coordinator of the Friends of the Forks of the Road, for help in getting the names added. Boxley suggested that new memorial plaques were needed to correct the exclusion related to the racial segregation of the Jim Crow era. Media covered the reaction of the new owner of the monument, the United States General Services Administration (GSA), which manages public buildings on behalf of federal courts and agencies.