Must-see hits home

In response to “Must-See Spots in ’16” by Christopher Reynolds, Dec. 27, which included Natchez, Miss.: Visiting tiny Natchez (pop. about 16,000) offers invaluable, if often suppressed, history lessons.

Natchez is one of the few U.S. cities with more than 500 structures built before 1860, and includes many stately antebellum mansions. Two historically unflattering footnotes explain why:

First, slavery provided plantation owners with cheap labor, enabling them to amass great wealth from agriculture and to construct mansions in Natchez so regal and durable that more than 40 of them now serve as bed-and-breakfasts.

Second, when the Civil War brought Union troops to Natchez, its residents didn’t resist mightily as other Southerners did. Instead the city “practically laid down and rolled over,” as a Times story said in 2013. Thus it escaped ruinous Union shellings that devastated other cities’ architectural treasures.

Natchez, for all its antebellum splendor, teaches that the social and economic benefits derived from ancestral crimes and indiscretions can endure for generations.

Ed Alston Santa Monica

The article by Reynolds was quite interesting as he listed what he thought were 16 locations interesting enough to visit. Nine of those 16 sixteen spots were outside of the U.S. It was more than intriguing, and rather flattering, that one of those spots was not only in California but right here in Orange County, including the Newport Beach Island Hotel. It’s good to know that the city in which I live is among those 16 worldwide featured spots by Reynolds. Bill Spitalnick

Newport Beach