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Ashley Peles

ReImagining Fort Rosalie (LAA/MAS 2016)

(Title Slide 1) This presentation represents a little over a year’s worth of work on a project

related to 3D modeling. It is certainly not a project that is in its finished form and is one that I

will be working on at least through the summer (and likely further). With that in mind, I hope

you can forgive me the aspects that might be a little rough around the edges; however, I like to

think of this as meaning that there’s still more flexibility in what the final form ends up being.

What I wanted to do today is provide a brief overview of the Rebuilding Natchez project, trace

out where my documentation has come from for both the landscape and buildings, and finish up

by talking about where this project is headed.

This project represents my attempt, with help, to reimagine Natchez, Mississippi in the early

French colonial period. The absence of above-ground features from Natchez’s earliest French

colonial history, combined with the contemporary historical descriptions and depictions, makes it

a good, if challenging, subject for a 3d reconstruction. The specific history of Natchez affects

how this reconstruction has progressed, so I’ll start with a brief overview of events in Natchez

history related to Fort Rosalie.

Historical Overview

(Slide 2) Although Natchez was visited and settled by small groups of people beginning in 1699,

the founding of the town is officially 1716, when Bienville finished construction of Fort Rosalie.

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Natchez was one of many settlements within the Louisiana colony that was set up by the French

and as such was primarily intended to create profits for the French Crown. The location of the

Natchez settlement, on prime agricultural land, set the colony up for friction with the Natchez

Indians, one of the only complex chiefdoms in this area to survive into the historic period. While

there were a number of smaller skirmishes between the Natchez and French, the tipping point

was apparently the arrival of Commander Chepart in 1729. According to lieutenant and engineer

Dumont de Montigny, Chepart’s attempt to seize the Natchez Grand Village was the event that

set off the massacre of 1729. Apparently native groups of many Indian nations planned to attack

the French on the same day in their respective areas, but the Natchez attacked early on

November 29. Chepart ignored warnings of the impending attack and lost somewhere around

230 men in the massacre. After the uprising, the Indians destroyed the entire French settlement

of Natchez (Barnett 2007).

Clearly this was not the end of Natchez, Mississippi; upon hearing of the attack the Chevalier de

Lobois led a force from New Orleans and, in 1730, essentially ended the Natchez as a nation.

From the ashes, the French settlement was rebuilt, as was Fort Rosalie. The fort regained life in

1732 as a pentagonal, earthen embankment. In 1763 the territory was ceded to England and the

English-occupied fort was renamed Fort Panmure. The fort came into Spanish control in 1779

during the American Revolution; in 1798 the fort was ceded to the United States and ultimately

abandoned in 1800 (Nyman and Steponaitis 2014).

(Slide 3) The history of Fort Rosalie provides indications of some of the complications for

reconstruction. Based on overlays of historic maps it appears that the second fort was built

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directly on top of the first fort, a process that would have effectively obliterated the majority of

the original historic remains. (Slide 4) The pentagonal fort’s ruins, in particular the earthen

embankment, were visible throughout the 19th century and even commemorated on a postcard.

However, the loess soils that make Natchez so agriculturally rich can also be its worst enemy.

While loess soil overall is extremely stable, it loses that stability in catastrophic ways if it is

inundated with water. Throughout the 1800s a series of landslides took away portions of the fort;

the “Great Landslide” of 1869 took away most of what was left.

The second difficulty, then, is that extreme erosion has caused the loss of most of what may have

been left of either of the forts. There have been archaeological excavations done at Fort Rosalie;

you’ll hear about those in the next paper. However, even with archaeological excavations, we

have very little evidence that might help to reconstruct either the first fort or the buildings

located inside.

Terrain Construction

(Slide 5) Given that we don’t have direct physical evidence for the construction of the fort, the

buildings in the fort, or the other buildings inhabited and used by early French residents of

Natchez, reconstructing that past requires a combination of evidence. To begin with the base of

all these reconstructions, I will start with the Natchez landscape.

The current bluff line along the Mississippi River is drastically different today than it would have

been in the 1720s. The various “steps” of bluff lines between the fort and the Mississippi River

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have changed over time based on which pieces of the bluff have sloughed off. (Slide 6) Based on

the work Vin Steponaitis has done aligning map overlays, we believe that early maps drawn by

military officer Ignace Francois Broutin in 1723 and 1730 were quite accurate as to the Natchez

terrain. (Slide 7) As a result, we decided to use Broutin’s 1723 map as the seed to germinate a

reimagining of Natchez before the settlement was destroyed. While it might have been nice to try

and recreate the entire map landscape, larger files in Unity means more data and more objects,

the size and amount of which are constrained by our computer specs. Based on this, I reduced the

original map down to a smaller square that I thought would be an appropriate size for working

with this project. In hindsight, I actually wish I had reduced this size even more, which can

hopefully serve as a bit of a warning for anyone considering their own reconstruction.

(Slide 8) The first step of this process was actually quite analog – I worked with a current Digital

Elevation Model of Natchez and estimated the heights of various landscape features on Broutin’s

1723 map. By converting the DEM raster to points, I was able to use the polygon tool to assign

my own values to the various landscape features.

(Slide 9) As you can see here, entirely recreating a landscape can create a pretty artificial looking

map that basically has plateaus of various heights. In order to create a more realistic landscape,

we decided to use the current landscape of Natchez, which in many ways is relatively close to the

historic appearance, once you take modern features off. We started with Lidar that I obtained

from the Mississippi Geospatial Clearinghouse. (Slide 10) Because the Lidar file did not have

any points in the Mississippi River, I combined a portion of my created DEM with the lidar to

artificially provide point data for those areas. This combination did not work out perfectly – I

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was left with an outline of my recreated bluff and then a lot of noise inbetween the old and

current bluff lines. I did my best to edit the point data of these areas to better reflect Broutin’s

map. I then converted my points back to a raster that could be read as a DEM by using the IDW

(3D Analyst) tool. Basically, this is a tool that smooths the values of within and around each cell,

with some wiggle room based on the values that you can set for it.

(Slide 11) In order to bring the DEM into Unity, I had to use two other programs. First, I

exported my DEM data as a GEOTIFF and opened the .tif in 3DEM. I then exported my

landscape as a .ter file. Second, I opened the .ter file in Terragen Classic. From here, I was able

to export my terrain as an 8 bit RAW file, a file type that can be read in Unity. When this terrain

was initially brought into Unity, the heightmap still had some noise along the bluff lines. Rather

than attempt to go back to ArcMap to try and remove this noise (which I could not see well on a

map and therefore would have been very difficult), I used Unity’s terrain shaping tools to first

raise and lower the terrains, and then to essentially create some erosion along the bluffs so they

did not appear to be completely smooth. Lastly, I “painted” Broutin’s map as a texture onto my

terrain, with the tiling set to the entire size of the terrain (which was scaled to the distances of the

visible extent of my area of interest in ArcMap) so that the map sits perfectly on the terrain.

(Note: Slides 12 and 13 I discussed extemporaneously. Slide 12 shows the unalterated present

landscape of Natchez with Broutin’s map overlaid, so that you can see how the fort has fallen

over the edge of the current bluff line. Slide 13 shows the rebuilt bluff and landscape, so you can

now see the fort along the edge of the old bluff line)

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French Architecture

(Slide 14) When colonial French architecture is mentioned, the first place many people’s minds

go is to New Orleans. Even now, there are many examples of beautiful, ornate, French

architecture. If you know where to look, there are even still examples of less ornate vernacular

French architecture. However, these ornate styles do not necessarily reflect the colonial buildings

of the early1700s. (Slide 15) Even the typical architectural feature on vernacular French creole

buildings – the gallery – probably did not become popular until the 1740s (Maygarden 2006). In

all likelihood, galleries originated in the French West Indies and then spread northward (Peterson

1993). All of the early French colonial houses that I know of are post-1740, however. While they

can be used as a model for some things, they are a little more ornate than what probably would

have been in Natchez. With no extant examples of early French colonial buildings to base exact

models on and a small number of fort reconstructions, I used three main sources to decide on

architectural details: architectural histories, contemporary map depictions, and archaeology.

(Slide 16) Architectural histories included two more formal histories (Daspit 1996; Cizek 1997)

and an honor’s thesis examining Dumont de Montigny’s maps of Natchez (Litschi 2011).

Litschi’s (2011) research analyzes the buildings styles present in the four surviving Dumont

maps (c.1730, c.1740, 1744, 1747); however, it does appear that all of Dumont’s drawings were

memory maps. Even if he drew some of the landscape portions of the maps during his time in

Natchez, the time periods he depicts on the maps are many years earlier. (Slide 17) As a result, I

decided to also look at depictions on a number of other early French maps, including Nortlet’s

1717 map of Dauphin Isle, Le Bouteaux’s 1720 map of Biloxi, and Dumont’s c.1729 map of

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Natchez, c. 1747 map of New Orleans, c. 1750 map of the Fort St. Claude, and c. 1750 map of

M. Le Blanc’s concession in Yazoo. I used these depictions in order to decide on architectural

details for houses, including the numbers of windows, doors, chimneys, and the roof styles on

storehouses, magazines, garrisons, and houses. (Slide 18) The third source I used was

archaeology. There has been very little work done that has uncovered well preserved early

French architecture. One exception to this was archaeology led by Gregory Waselkov at Old

Mobile, which was a French settlement during the early 1700s. In particular, I relied on

descriptions of the earthfast (poteaux-sur-sole) structures uncovered at Old Mobile and

elsewhere. Based on those descriptions, I decided on an average size for rooms, as well as an

average number of rooms for small, medium, and large houses. Additionally, because all the

domestic structures excavated at Old Mobile contained evidence for brick fireplaces/chimneys

(Gums 2002), I included that architectural detail in all the houses included in my own recreation,

rather than the bousillage construction discussed by Litschi (2011).

(Slide 19) (Note: in the powerpoint, I have 360 spins of the buildings that I discuss. These can be

accessed online at my Vimeo page, under the username ArchDigger:

https://vimeo.com/user48999494/videos) In terms of the actual buildings, for this iteration of my

map, I’ve picked a certain amount of “base models” for French buildings, as it can become very

time consuming to both create, apply textures, and place each building on the landscape if they

are unique. In these first two illustrations, you can see the four base models I’ve chosen for

households. I have three sizes of house – small, medium, and large – as well as a building that

I’m calling a storehouse, but which would have just been a building/room available to residents

for storing things in, especially crops. Placement of windows, doors, and fireplaces were based

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on the images drawn on contemporary maps. (Slide 20) From the maps I also determined a few

different options for houses, one of which was the building material. Most houses have a

bousillage and a clapboard option. Bousillage was technically a mixture of clay and grass or

other substance that was used to fill the spaces between the timbers of a house, and was then

plastered over. Other buildings had clapboard added as an exterior treatment, hence my inclusion

of them here. Similarly, houses could have had either thatch or shingle roofs; I’ve generally used

thatch roofs on the smaller buildings, but added shingles on larger or hipped roof buildings.

Lastly, there were two main roof styles - gable and hipped roofs. Hipped roofs were more of an

investment, sot that is why I have associated shingles with them.

(Slide 21) For Fort Rosalie, there are two overall components; the palisade of the original fort

and the buildings inside. There are many different ways that a palisade could have looked.

Without evidence for or against various styles, I followed some of the French fort

reconstructions that, Fort Toulouse being an example. The buildings located inside the fort are

based on Broutin’s map description. (Slide 22) This includes barracks, a magazine, and the

officer’s house. For these buildings, I have again followed the lead of Fort Toulouse and Fort St.

Jean Baptiste, and created buildings with clapboard exteriors, some that have shingle roofs and

some that have thatch roofs.

(Slide 23) (Flythrough can be accessed through the following link, also on my vimeo page:

https://vimeo.com/155458491) All of the landscape features and buildings come together to

create a relatively unified vision of what French colonial Natchez might have looked like. What I

am showing now is a flythrough of my current Natchez environment. As you can see, I still need

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to add some of the textures onto the map, particularly in the areas where there were fields. Where

you’ll see houses coming up is where Broutin’s map indicates that there are houses. He does not

tell us about the structures at each place, so I made my own guesses based on the number of

buildings indicated on the map. I also took a leap of faith and assumed that Broutin’s map

showed all the buildings within a settlement, meaning that I could take the small storehouses and

include them as one of the rectangles that indicated by Broutin.

The program I’m using here is called Unity3d – it’s a gaming engine, which means that its

primary function is to create games that can be played by people, offering both a 2-d and 3-d

component. However, it has a lot of applications outside of video gaming. What I like about

Unity is that it provides you with an interesting visual and spatial sense of a landscape that

otherwise remains primarily unseen. The flythrough itself is great for providing a visual for

people to look at, but there are some more things that I am planning on adding to this to make it

more of an interactive experience. My ultimate goal is to provide a reconstruction that can be

used by the National Park Service, particularly as part of the celebrations of Natchez’s 300th

anniversary. I would like to be able to add icons that would allow someone on a touch screen to

move around the landscape. I would also like to add some information about the map and

reconstructions. For example, as I’ve mentioned and Vin has detailed, Fort Rosalie has gone

through a lot of different iterations, and the way the fort was depicted on various maps can be a

study within itself. As part of this I would like to have information aspects that can be accessed

through icons. Information about the Fort Rosalie maps and iterations would be a natural place to

go. Additionally, I would like to have some bits that describe how the reconstructions were

created, which allow people to understand how archaeologists/historians approach this type of

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research and also emphasizes that this reconstruction is just one version of what the landscape

could have looked like; there are other ways the reconstruction could have gone. By putting these

things together, I can have more than just a pretty map (although that’s pretty cool in and of

itself) – instead, this can also be a great interactive learning experience. (Acknowledgments Slide

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Works Cited

Barnett, James F.

2007 The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735. University of Mississippi, Jackson.

Cizek, Eugene Darwin

1997 Beginnings: Creole Architecture for the Louisiana Setting. In Louisiana Buildings 1720-

1940, edited by Jessie Poesch and Barbara SoRelle Bacot. Louisiana State University

Press, Baton Rouge.

Daspit, Fred

1996 Louisiana Architecture: 1714-1830. The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of

Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette.

Gums, Bonnie L.

2002 Earthfast (Pieux en Terre) Structures at Old Mobile. Historical Archaeology 36(1):13-25.

French Colonial Archaeology at Old Mobile: Selected Studies, edited by Greg Waselkov.

Litschi, Melissa

2011 The French Natchez Settlement According to the Memory of Dumont de Montigny.

Unpublished honor’s thesis, Curriculum in Archaeology, University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill.

Maygarden, Benjamin D.

2006 Building in Colonial Louisiana: Creolization and the Survival of French Traditions.

International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10:211-239.

Nyman, James A. and Vincas P. Steponaitis

2014 Indian Pottery at Fort Rosalie in Natchez, a French Colonial Outpost in the Lower

Mississippi Valley, 1716-1763. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for

American Archaeology, Austin, Texas.

ReImagining Fort Rosalie

Ashley Peles

RESEARCH LABORATORIESOF ARCHAEOLOGY

1723

1730

1732

Base Map;Broutin 1730

Pentagonal Fort:Broutin 1732

1907 Postcard

c.1930 Photograph

Collot 1796 – View of the Fort of the Natchez

Creation of Elevation Data

Result ofIDW (3D Analyst)

Map Overlay in ArcScene

Modifying DEM/Lidar Data in ArcMap

GeoTiff in 3DEMConverting .ter to .raw in Terragen

Terrain created from .raw, Broutin 1723 map texture

ArcGIS to Unity

Ursuline Convent, c.1751Originally designed by Broutin in 1727

1034-1036 Royal St.Vieux Carré Digital Survey

Bequette-Ribault House, 1808Sainte Genevieve, Missouri

Architectural Sources

Louisiana Architecture:1714-1820

Louisiana Buildings:1720-1940

Biloxi 1720

Natchez c. 1729

New Orleans 1747

Fort St. Claude c. 1750

Yazoo Concession 1753

Dauphin Isle 1717

Various Map Depictions of Early French Architecture

Archaeology at Old Mobile

Structure 1 (poteaux-sur-sole)

Structure 30 (poteaux-en-terre)

Small Houses and Small Storage Buildings

Large House Medium House

Fort Rosalie

MagazineBarracks

Acknowledgements

Ethan Watrall

Lynn Goldstein

Shawn Graham

Maurizio Forte

Nevio Danelon

Dan Anderson

Vin Steponaitis

Joyce Rudinsky

Cody Owens