House Tour: Grand Antebellum Mansion, Stanton Hall

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Here it is, the historic house tour to end all historic house tours (not literally, obviously). As a sign of thanks to all our friends here on YouTube we have arranged a special, never before allowed private home tour of the incomparable Stanton Hall in Natchez Ms.

This 14,000 antebellum mansion (never a plantation home) is the pinnacle of the Natchez form, and has been lovingly restored and maintained by the ladies of the Pilgrimage Garden Club for the last eighty-two years. Were it not for the tireless work of the Pilgrimage Garden Club Stanton Hall, Longwood, and many other of the architectural masterpieces found only in this city would have been lost. We cannot thank the members enough for allowing us to share this treasure with you, and to member and tour guide Judy who takes us through the home today.

The palatial proportions of Stanton Hall and the variety of its Victorian
detail represent antebellum opulence rarely achieved and more rarely
maintained. Built for Frederick Stanton, a Cotton broker, in the years
1851-57, the construction project is reputed to have required a
chartered vessel from Europe to bring the carved moldings, cast and
wrought iron, exterior ornament and fence, Carrara marble mantelpieces,
bronze chandeliers, gold-framed mirrors, silver hardware, and appropriate
furniture. More successful as a showplace than a residence, Stanton
Hall continues to impress the visitors who tour it daily as a museum.

The house dominates an urban hilltop site which is a
full block square. The surrounding iron fence has elaborate gate posts
with a lyre motif. Four giant order fluted columns with modified
Corinthian capitals maintain the tradition of Natchez porticoes with an
added richness. Pilasters at the large sidelighted entrance have tra-
ditional Corinthian caps. Iron lace railings decorate both levels of
the portico and a two-story gallery on the west elevation. The principal
mass of the house is plastered and painted white with dark green shutters
Above the hip roof is a large belvedere with two arched openings on each
side and an overhanging bracketed cornice.

The anterior also combines classicism with more ornate styles. Its scale
is evident in the central hall which is 16 feet wide and 72 feet long.
All the doors on the first floor have heavy Greek frames with anthemion
bands and acroteria-ornamented cornices. The length of the hall is
broken only by an elliptical arch supported on consoles. The ballroom,
at the right, is similarly divided by a triple arch with foliated corbels
and pendants. The five first-floor mantels are of white Carrara marble
richly carved with fruits and flowers. Bronze chandeliers with etched
glass diffusing shades hang from plaster rosettes in each room. Each
chandelier has a unique design; those in the dining room represent the
Natchez Indians in battle array. By opening the sliding doors between
the ballroom and music room, the entire length of the house is infinitely
extended in immense gold-framed mirrors which face each other 72 feet
apart.

To the left of the central hall a stairhall separates the library at the
front from the dining room at the rear. Stairs begin at the grade level
porte-cochere and rise to the attic below the belvedere. Bedrooms on
the second floor repeat the scale of the first floor but with simplified
moldings and black marble mantels.

A service wing at the rear is less extensive than originally and con-
tains bathrooms, a caretaker's apartment, and the shop and office
required in its present function as a museum house. Plantings, particu-
larly live oak trees, on the front of the property have matured to a
beauty not experienced by the original owners. The rear of the property
includes parking area, restaurant and swimming pool for the Pilgrimage
Garden Club.

Take advantage of light crowds and the temperate weather and visit Natchez in January! Her homes will be ready for you to tour, and her people can't wait to show you some Southern Hospitality
Named Belfast by Frederick Stanton, the cotton broker who built it in
1851-58, the house had been completed only a short while when he died.
Its institutional scale made it a maintenance burden to his descendants.
In the 1890s it became the Stanton College for Young Ladies. In 1940,
after a variety of uses, it was purchased by the Pilgrimage Garden Club
and restored as their headquarters.


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