The president of the Natchez Board of Education stated at the cornerstone laying ceremony that it would "serve as a monument to the past showing what can be accomplished in a few years by willing hearts and ready hands.

It was a teen canteen, a library, a charity clothing drop-off center, a museum, an American Legion hall, a place for the city to store voting booths, a location for boxing matches, and it occasionally still hosted public performances.

One notable use began in 1932, as the first pageant was held in Memorial Hall during the Natchez Pilgrimage, the nation's second oldest organized house tour.

In 1987, the Historic Natchez Foundation, working with the city, purchased the dilapidated building, began emergency repairs, and waited for a preservation-supportive occupant.

On March 14, 2010, the Natchez Democrat reported that the names of more than 500 black servicemen from Adams County in World War I had been excluded from the memorial plaques, which were installed in 1924 during an extended period of state racial segregation, at what is now the US Courthouse.

Shane Peterson, a student at California State University Northridge, had researched the issue and published a paper online; he found that a federal roster shows that 581 black men entered the U.S. Army from Adams County between 1917 and 1918, and approximately 200 of the veterans returned to Adams County after the war, yet none is listed on the courthouse plaques.

Boxley suggested that new memorial plaques were needed to correct the exclusion related to the racial segregation of the Jim Crow era.

[4] Media covered the reaction of the new owner of the monument, the United States General Services Administration (GSA), which manages public buildings on behalf of federal courts and agencies.

[7] The original plaques will be moved inside to be part of an interpretive exhibit on Natchez in World War I and the roles played by all its veterans.

It was designed by the noted English-born Kentucky architect Thomas Lewinski, while he worked as supervisor of the construction of a nearby Marine Hospital.

The engaged portico features paired pilasters supporting a triple banded architrave, a wide frieze, a molded cornice, and a pediment.

Inside, a pair of wood doors adorned with upper panel patterning of octagonal openings is present at the foyer's rear wall.

To give visitors a sense of the original width of the room and allow light to penetrate the courtroom, above eye level, wood louvers and glass panels top the partitions.