The Architecture Tour
“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” —William Faulkner
They came. They saw. They conquered. And then they built. The designs were many: Greek Revival, Italianate, Neoclassical, Federal, Gothic Revival, Romanesque, Victorian, Empire, Prairie, Carpenter Gothic. The materials were equally diverse: Italian marble, slave-made brick, native stone, imported mahogany, homegrown clapboard. And the results? You can see those for yourself in cities and historic neighborhoods and even in the verdant countryside across the Mississippi Hills.
There are no cragged city skylines here, no stooping to scale the heights of those anonymous and vertiginous glass boxes. Instead our architecture covers a breadth of stylistic territory that reaches all the way back to the rich and colorful past of the early nineteenth century, when the settlers who migrated to the Hills came with big dreams and sometimes a few schemes. Even in those early days, when land speculation was not unheard of, a newly minted fortune often meant a fine home could not be far behind.
The native peoples these new Hills inhabitants replaced had enjoyed their own building heritage; they were, after all, the “mound builders,” constructing magnificent burial mounds to honor their departed. By the early 1800s, Indian villages of thatched mud and plaster huts (never tepees) had given way to log cabin homesteads much like those of the white settlers. The Choctaw Chief Moshulatubbee lived in a two-story four-room log home that a white builder has constructed for him and that he sold for $100 when he went west with his tribe after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed.
While the ultimate fairness of that treaty and others would be subject to debate, the lawfulness of it was important both to the natives and the white settlers, who also showed their respect for law and order with their grandly designed temples of justice.