Today we have another couple of Antebellum houses to visit, we decided to take the car rather than rely on the hop on hop off bus as they only seem to run once an hour and the houses have specific times to visit so we set off for our first house which is Longwood. This is possibly one of my favourite houses mostly because it is so different. It is known as the “Oriental Villa which is an octagonal house, they started work on the build in 1860 and workmen from the North were brought in due to the complex design. Work was halted in 1861 because of tensions over the Civil War but everyone only expected the war to last six months so the workers just downed tools and went back north expecting to return quite quickly. The basement was finished so the family moved into this again expecting this to only be a temporary thing. They furnished it with furniture from their previous home and from Julia Nutt’s mothers house as a lot of the furniture they had ordered was caught in the blockade so didn’t make it through. Three generations of the family actually ended up living in the basement until it was sold some time in the 1940’s. When I say basement there are worse places to live. We had a private tour as one of the things we have found about the Americans is they don’t seem to start very early, we were taken through each of the rooms which are magnificent and I would be more than happy with before you look at the rest of it! They actually have the original plans so they know what each of the rooms were intended to be used for as well as what they were actually used for. The boys had one bedroom, they parents another and there was a very nice dinning room and sitting room as well as quite an impressive entrance hall considering where we were, having looked round the downstairs we then went up to what should have been the main floor which is just like a building site, you can really see that they expected to return. Unfortunately despite being Union supporters, the Nutt family’s fortune was in cotton and their whole year’s crop was burnt by Union soldiers as they were on the way to Vicksburg and the family lost all their money during the war. The husband died towards the end of the war from Yellow fever and Julia brought up her 8 children in the house. She lost all of the land she had with the exception of the ‘Town House’ Longwood and the associated land which was actually 90 acres, it has a detached kitchen, a ‘necessary’ (loo), carriage house and a three story brick dependency known as the servants quarters, this was intended to house the enslaved men and women who worked in the home as cooks, nannies and maids. It was built in 1830 and was actually used to house the family originally. It was built with the expectation of housing 32 servants to manage the house, it is a sign of how grand the new house was going to be that the family lived in the basement rather than this three story house. The house would have been absolutely magnificent, and there was an opportunity for it to be completed when one of the Oil Millionaire’s wives from Texas decided she would take the house on and finish it, unfortunately she seemed to get bored with this idea very quickly so no work was done on the house and it was deeded to the Pilgrimage Garden Club (another version of ladies that lunch but this lot actually garden and drink!) as a tax write off. We walked round the house then had a bit of a walk around the grounds we went down to the cemetery then came back and looked at the carriage house and what was left of the kitchen. Like all houses in the south the kitchen was separate but this one actually did burn down and this was built in its place. According to the plans if the house had been completed the kitchen would have been knocked down and a new kitchen that matched the style of the house would have been built, it would have been 2 stories and would have had an observatory like the main house but this one would have contained tanks to supply hot water to the house. From here we drove round to Melrose, this estate was established in 1848 and was home to the McMurrans until the conclusion of the civil war, again he made his fortune in cotton, he owned five plantations, and the house was built to demonstrate that wealth. This estate was 132 acres and he employed an architect to built his house which took eight years by a labour force of free whites and enslaved blacks, of which he had many. It is said that Melrose was “the finest home in all of the Natchez region” and it was furnished with “all that fine taste and a full purse” could provide. They had a mahogany “punkah” that when operated by a child slave, shooed flies away from the food as well as provide a general draft. In the grounds there were a number of brick or wooden buildings which housed the kitchen, livestock, carriages, tool sheds and of course the slaves. We went to the cabins where they lived and one has been laid out to represent how the family would live, there were a number of boards talking about slavery and the impact it had, the information boards contained transcripts from interviews with previous slaves. These had been carried out in the 1920s and 30s as slaves were not allowed to read or write so there is no documentation on how they felt at the time, however the information boards made the observation that the interviews were carried out by whites in a time when racial segregation was rife and the people being interviewed had spent their entire lives in servitude and were conditioned to make the white people happy, therefore were the responses given what they thought the interviewers wanted to hear? It is a good point as the only record of what actually happened is from the perspective of the slave owners rather than those that were enslaved. The Davies family purchased the house in 1865 and descendants of this family lived in the house until 1976 when it was sold to the Callon’s who sold it to the park service in 1990. The house opened for tours in 1932 as part of the Spring Pilgrimage and this tradition continued until the Park Service took over the property and opened it to the public year round. The guide said that when the house was purchased it came with ‘a slave’ who had been at the house all the way through and didn’t have anywhere else to live so the park service made him a ranger and he continued to live on the property and provide guided tours as it was the only thing he knew. From here we went to the Forks in the Road which we had seen from the bus yesterday, this was the site of the second largest slave market in the south. We then went back to the hotel to drop the car and walk up into town where we just managed to have lunch before everything closed then went to the First Presbyterian Church which is home to a collection of historic photographs. The whole of the first floor is just filled with photos of street scenes, rural life, people and steamboats. There are more than 500 photos with information on each one that provides information on either the circumstances or the people in them. The Portrait section contains people of all ages and backgrounds, a lot of fine ladies in their best clothes but also many people just out shopping or traveling on the riverboat. There are also a number of photos that show the town when the Mississippi River is flooded and of course lots of photos of riverboats loaded with cotton. The photos span the period from 1850 to 1950 although there are not many from past about 1930, it was fascinating and we spent ages walking round looking at the photo and reading the captions. By the time we finished we had spent almost an hour and a half looking at the photos so we set off for our final stop in Natchez which is the area they call Natchez under the hill. This is where the ferry used to cross to Louisiana before the bridge was built and it is a great place to look both ways down the river. Then it was back to the hotel to prepare for moving on tomorrow.
