Natchez spent most of its first century unsure which empire owned it. The French built Fort Rosalie on the bluff in 1716. The British took it after the Seven Years' War. Spain seized control in 1779 and held on even after the Treaty of Paris handed the territory to the United States — not yielding until 1797, when an American flag finally went up over the bluff. By then, The Elms had already stood for fifteen years: a Spanish cottage built in 1782, when this town belonged to the Crown in Madrid. After 1798, American owners expanded the original structure, and you can read the change in the architecture if you know how to look — a house that grew when the people inside it changed nationality without moving. Over 240 years of continuous use. The city that formed around it was always something other than its current flag suggested, and the buildings remember.
