Off the road that leads south, off the Blues Highway, into the countryside towards Mississippi, lies one of the most amazing and unexpected sights in the U.S. state of Mississippi.
To get to the Windsor Ruins on the outskirts of Port Gibson, you have to follow a road that leads through a primeval forest. There are no signposts here, just densely overgrown swampland and ancient trees. The road is deserted.
Greek columns
Then they appear: Greek columns in the middle of the USA, far from any settlement. There are 29 of them, all more than 160 years old. They are the remains of a former princely estate of historical importance. The house, named "Windsor" after an English model, today only the ruin of a ruin, was the manor house of the largest plantation of its time in the mid-19th century.
Windsor Manor was four stories high, with 25 bedrooms and a lookout tower at the top. Built between 1859 and 1861 in the Greek-Italian style, the stars were never kind to the palatial house in Claiborne County, Mississippi, USA, about 10 miles southwest of Port Gibson near Alcorn State University.
Funny fact: The stairway from the old house, made by iron, still stands at one house at Alcorn.
An occupied Manor
As soon as the Civil War began, Confederate and Union soldiers took turns occupying the manor. Both sides used it to care for wounded soldiers and utilized the lookout tower to keep an eye on the enemy.
The manor survived the Civil War, its location in the slightly swampy middle of nowhere protecting the proud house on the Mississippi that Smith Coffee Daniell II had his slaves build on his 21,000 acres of plantation land in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Built directly on the Mississippi River, which was then the region's main transportation route, architect David Shroder had designed a huge classical structure that a group of skilled craftsmen - carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, and painters - from Mississippi, the northeastern states, and even Europe spent two years raising.
A tower with glass walls
It couldn't have been more modern at the time. The basement contained a schoolroom, doctor's office, dairy, canteen, and storage rooms. The second floor housed the master bedroom, a bathroom, two parlors, a study, and a library. The dining room was on the second-floor extension.
Connected to the dining room by a dumbwaiter was the kitchen on the ground floor. The third floor included an additional bathroom and eight more bedrooms. Eight chimneys protruded from the slate-covered roof, and a vaulted dome with glass walls was built over the attic, above the main block of the mansion.
Today, an amount of six millions
Construction costs are said to have been around $175,000, which, sounds like a small amount but today, would be equivalent to almost six million U.S. dollars.
Daniell II was born in Mississippi and had already become enormously wealthy as a cotton planter by the age of 30. In 1849, Smith Daniell married his cousin Catherine Freeland (1830-1903). Together they had six children, but only three reached adulthood. Tragically, Coffee Daniell II died on April 12, 1861, just a few weeks after the completion of his lavish estate, at only 34 years old.
After the tragedy
Shortly afterward, the American Civil War began in 1861, and Confederate forces used the dome of the Windsor Mansion as an observation platform and signal station. In the spring of 1863, Union General Ulysses S. Grant and 17,000 Union troops landed in the harbor of Bruinsburg as part of his Vicksburg campaign and took control of the Windsor Mansion.
After the Battle of Port Gibson, the mansion was used by Union troops as a hospital and observation post. During the Union occupation, the Daniell family was allowed to live on the third floor of the house.
After the war, Daniell's wife and children continued to live on the property, but they could not stop the decline of the family property during the Civil War. Legend has it that the house, which collected rainwater in tanks and used it to fill two large bathrooms, once even welcomed the great writer Mark Twain, who came to look out over the Mississippi from the tower. But just a few years after the end of the war, on February 17, 1890, a fire broke out on the third floor.
Dead by a cigarette
The house did survive the Civil War but ultimately burned down to the pillars and some iron structures on February 17, 1890. At a party, a guest left a lit cigar on the upper balcony. As always, the butt ignited the wood, and a terrible fire broke out. In a very short time, the house burned down completely.
All of the family's photographs and house drawings were lost. No one was hurt, but only the pillars of the house remained standing (coordinates 31°56′26″N 91°07′46″W). Not even pictures remained showing the house as it had looked.
Only one picture
It wasn't until 1991 that historians discovered a soldier's drawing showing the largest pre-Civil War Greek Revival mansion ever built in the state, with its Corinthian columns. For over 100 years, the Windsor house's exterior appearance had been a matter of conjecture - now a sketch by former Union officer Henry Otis Dwight of the 20th Ohio Infantry Regiment showed what it might have looked like. Henry Dwight had probably made the sketch when his unit camped on the house's grounds during the war.
Windsor Manor was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and declared a Mississippi Landmark in 1985 because, although the building no longer exists, it is considered a cultural monument: All the original 29 columns were made of brick covered with stucco.
Each column was more than 3 feet in diameter at the base and 40 feet tall. The columns were erected on 10-foot-high, paneled brick bases that measured almost 5 feet square.
Iron capitals
The bricks were made in a kiln on-site. The fluted columns were topped with ornate iron Corinthian capitals. The columns were connected at the third floor level by decorative iron balustrades—made in St. Louis and shipped down the Mississippi to the port of Bruinsburg and still visible high above today.
The remarkable property was not only an architectural masterpiece but also a symbol of the wealth and splendor of the antebellum South. Today, the Windsor Ruins are not only a monument to history and a place of excursion for people who are drawn to where everyone else isn't, but also a testament to the transience of human works. Of history, even if it has manifested itself in stones and columns, sometimes only a ruin remains. And sometimes only the ruin of a ruin.
Romantic views
As you descend through the green jungle all around, there's a feeling of awe and melancholy in the air. The last rays of sunlight disappear behind the columns. The beauty of the ruins seems romantic, as if they could tell stories from the past if only someone were here to listen.
