Intersection of High and North Rankin streets

Intersection of High and North Rankin streets. Natchez Trails. This 1866 view of High Street shows two houses, but one is no longer standing. The surviving house in the foreground has porches with the kind of sawn wooden railing that is called “gingerbread,” because it looks like the paper patterns used in the 1800s to decorate gingerbread with powdered sugar. , Christopher Kyle, a white Natchez merchant, probably built the Kyle House about 1820 for Nancy Kyle, a “free woman of color.” He was the father of her daughter Caroline. This is one of the few remaining examples of the small, pre-Civil War houses that were home to working-class white people and free people of color. The Historic Natchez Foundation saved the house from demolition in the 1980s. , The Cyrus Marsh House (behind you) was built in 1837. Marsh was a prosperous merchant and real estate developer. By the mid-1900s, however, the area had become run-down. In the 1990s, the Tillman family acquired and restored this and three other houses in this historic neighborhood. , The Thomas Staniforth House was built in 1854 for a Natchez builder. An 1866 photograph shows the fencing and landscaping, including an arch made of vines over the entrance gate.