Longwood

Longwood is an estate on the edge of Natchez, Mississippi.  What a place!

Bucking the prevailing penchant for houses in the classical revival style, planter Haller Nutt built this "Oriental villa" in 1858-61.  For his very wealthy client, Samuel Sloan, an architect from Philadelphia, designed the largest octagonal house in the U.S.

The magnificent first floor plan of Longwood with central rotunda

As many will know, there was a bit of a rage for octagonal houses in the mid/late-nineteenth century; the design was thought to be more efficient and salutary.  We have some rare surviving examples in Ontario, one of which is the Bird House, also known as Woodchester Villa, in Bracebridge.  (In the early 1980s I was involved in the acquisition of a heritage easement on the property as a condition of an Ontario Heritage Trust grant for its restoration.)

Bird House, Bracebridge (photo credit: Woodchester Villa)

Longwood is, well, a bit grander -- 32 rooms and over 10,000 square feet!  But the most interesting thing is the story of its construction.  Or rather how the construction came to an abrupt halt at the beginning of the Civil War.  I imagine the Philadelphia architect dropping everything and fleeing back up home, but certainly some of the key tradesmen did leave for points north when news of the war reached Natchez.  After the war the plantations and money were gone and construction never resumed.  Today the house is frozen in time, looking much as it did over 150 years ago -- but not finished and furnished like the other Natchez mansions; nor devoid of its furnishings but otherwise intact, like the wonderful Drayton Hall near Charleston; nor a ruin -- but a house whose basic structure was completed and most everything else left undone.

On the exterior you can't really tell, except for the windows.  The photo above shows windows on the main floor boarded up, not because they are damaged or missing and have not been restored, but because they were never installed in the first place.  What would these windows have looked like?  Two have been installed on either side of the front door by the Pilgrimage Garden Club which owns and operates the property.

Inside only the ground or basement level, originally intended mainly for the servants, was finished and that is where the family lived.  On the main or principal floor, as it's called in the plan shown above, this is what you see looking through the central rotunda to the hall and the main entrance.

And this is what you see looking up -- way up! -- from the rotunda to the cupola and dome above.

While Longwood is an ambitiously exuberant pile, the overall effect today is rather eerie and sad.

Abandoned construction tools in one of the unfinished rooms