Natchez is a tourist destination mostly because of the city’s rich history, much of which is alive today because Natchez is one of the few Southern cities that were not destroyed during the Civil War.

Others include New Orleans, Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina, which still have antebellum plantation houses and buildings intact.

For years, Natchez’s tourist base relied largely on the antebellum architecture and antique furnishings alone to capture visitors’ interests.

Tourism officials say tourists’ interests have changed in recent years, however.

Today, tourists want to know more about the historical aspects of the community and the existing structures, many of which were built by slaves.

Slavery is an unfortunate part of not only Natchez and the Miss-Lou’s history, but also the entire nation’s history.

And that history must be shared in order to learn from the past and to make the future better.

Natchez has made progress in recent years in telling aspects of the slave side of the area’s history but still has much to learn in order to do it well.

To that end, the Natchez Convention Promotion Commission and Visit Natchez have teamed up with tourism leaders from Louisiana, who have had success incorporating such heritage history into their plantation tours, to present a free seminar.

The seminars is titled “The Next Steps in Natchez Heritage Tourism — New Narratives in Old Neighborhoods” and will be presented from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. May 3 at the Natchez Convention Center.

The deadline to preregister for the event and receive a free lunch is today by emailing Katie Ernst at kernst@visitnatchez.org.

We encourage everyone who can to attend this free seminar to learn how to take Natchez tourism into the future while preserving important aspects of our past.