The Last Hurrah
Glimpsed through trees draped with spectral moss, Longwood looms like an exotic mirage. As audacious as it is unexpected, this is the doomed fantasy of scientist/planter Dr. Haller Nutt who dared ignore the gathering clouds of civil war and began construction of this extraordinary house in that fateful year, 1860. (Little wonder that his neighbors nicknamed the mansion “Nutt’s Folly.”) Wildly wealthy from Mississippi and Louisiana plantations, Dr. Nutt decided to build a new home near Natchez for his wife Julia and their eight children. With Greek Revival architecture fallen from fashion, he found inspiration in a design book by celebrated Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan. What captured Nutt’s fancy was a pattern called “Oriental Villa,” a three-story...
Read MoreSister Act
Windy Hill Manor was never one of Natchez’s biggest or grandest homes, but it harbored a celebrated fugitive and scored high in the eccentricity sweepstakes. Dubbed Halfway Hill when it was built southeast of town in 1788 by Colonel Benijah Osmun, it sat atop a gentle rise at the end of a lush cedar allée. Its relative remoteness held great appeal for Osmun’s old friend Aaron Burr who found temporary sanctuary in 1806 after being charged with treason. In 1817, the house was sold to Gerard Brandon, and afterwards to General Robert Stanton who planted his vast acreage with cotton, added rooms for his growing family and renamed the place Windy Hill. Stanton also gave the nondescript façade a columned gallery and installed a floating spiral staircase in the entry...
Read MoreThe Lovely Bones
Arguably the most famous and iconic plantation ruin in the South, twenty-three pillars are all that remain of Windsor, a home so grandiose in its heyday that Mississippi steamboat captains used it as a landmark. It’s haunting under any circumstances, more so when glimpsed through a dense morning fog, emerging as a series of vertical phantoms which slowly morph into great columns supporting only thin air. The evocative stone skeleton holds a preponderant sense of time lost and forgotten and, with minimal surrender, conjures images of what was. Indeed, no one knew what Windsor actually looked like until an accidental discovery late in the last century. Located below Port Gibson, Mississippi, Windsor was begun in 1859 and finished two years later. On a...
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