Sister 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...
Read MoreOne-Man Show
Seventy-five years ago today, the film version of Gone with the Wind premiered in Atlanta. It remains one of the most beloved classics in American cinema and holds the number six spot on the American Film Institute (AFI) list of 100 Greatest American Films. Cast, crew and history concur that the daunting task of transforming book-to-film would have been impossible without the passion and drive of one man, producer David O. Selznick. Flying in the face of naysayers insisting costume epics were passé and that civil war movies always lost money, Selznick Studios paid $50,000 for the screen rights to Margaret Mitchell’s phenomenally successful bestseller only a month after publication. The book, not incidentally, was first entitled Tomorrow Is Another Day and had a...
Read More
Recent Comments