Windsor Ruins

In the countryside of Claiborne County, Mississippi, twenty-three tall Corinthian columns stand in a loose square with nothing between them, some still joined at the top by fragments of cast-iron railing. They are all that remains of Windsor, the largest Greek Revival mansion ever built in the state, and the effect is closer to a ruined classical temple than to a burned-out farmhouse.

The house was built between 1859 and 1861 for Smith Coffee Daniell II, a cotton planter who had become very rich by the age of 30 and owned a plantation of some 2,600 acres a few miles east of the Mississippi River. The builder-architect David Shroder directed carpenters, plasterers, masons and painters from Mississippi, the northeastern states and Europe, while much of the labour was done by enslaved African Americans. Twenty-nine columns of brick, made in a kiln on site and finished with fluted stucco, set the outline of the house: each was about 40 feet (12 metres) tall, stood on a panelled brick base about 10 feet high, and carried an ornate iron capital. Between them ran deep verandas on the upper two floors. The ironwork, including four cast-iron staircases, was made in St. Louis and shipped down the river to the landing at Bruinsburg. The three-storey house had 23 to 25 rooms, each with its own fireplace, two indoor bathrooms fed by a rainwater tank in the attic, and a glass-walled cupola on the roof. Daniell died in April 1861, only weeks after it was finished, at the age of 34.

During the Civil War, Confederate troops used the cupola as a lookout and signal post. In the spring of 1863, at the start of his Vicksburg campaign, Ulysses S. Grant landed some 17,000 Union soldiers at Bruinsburg, and Windsor was taken over and later served as a Union hospital and observation post, while the Daniell family remained on the top floor. The house survived the war, but on 17 February 1890 a guest's dropped cigarette or cigar ash set fire to debris left by carpenters, and the mansion burned to the ground. Only the columns, some iron railings and a stairway were left; that stairway now leads into Oakland Memorial Chapel at nearby Alcorn State University. For a century no one knew exactly what the house had looked like, until in the early 1990s a sketch drawn in 1863 by a Union officer, Henry Otis Dwight, turned up among his papers. The family gave the site to the state in 1974, and the ruins appear in the films "Raintree County" (1957) and "Ghosts of Mississippi" (1996).

Getting there

The ruins are about 10 miles (16 km) southwest of the small town of Port Gibson, near Alcorn State University; Natchez is about 49 km away. The nearest airport in a straight line is Monroe Regional Airport (MLU) in Louisiana, about 106 km away across the Mississippi River; Jackson–Medgar Evers International Airport (JAN), on the Mississippi side, is at a similar distance.