Architecture

Mississippi architecture is not what you might think. Drive down most contemporary Mississippi highways and the preconceptions vanish: Where are the magnolias, the hanging moss, the columnar, constructed remnants of wealth and slavery? Where are the juke joints? Where is the evocative, power-charged place that provoked all that literature? Where is its beating heart?

To a casual observer, Mississippi architecture can seem bound in binary myths—either that of the pre–Civil War South, embodied by domestic structures like the pedimented, columned grand Natchez mansion-house Melrose (1847), or in rusting barns, cotton gins, and silos. The reality, however, transcends any singular narrative. Richer than any individual building, informed by a plethora of diversities (geographic, climatic, human, historic, economic, materialistic, stylistic, technological), scattered across a landscape of variable open or forested land and a network of waterways, Mississippi’s buildings and walkable small towns reflect a wealth of imagination and sophisticated accomplishment throughout the nation’s poorest state. The reality of the numerous artifacts across the landscape confounds simplistic mythmaking.

Myth runs deep and sometimes defines beginnings. Consider the earliest builders. The Woodland and Mississippian tribes who populated the lands that became Mississippi had built significant earthen structures hundreds of years before European exploration. Almost one thousand years separates Nanih Waiya (ca. A.D. 300), the legendary origin site of the Choctaw in the east, from the later mound builders in the Mississippi Delta at the Jaketown site near Belzoni in the west. Eroded but present, a powerful body of these earliest cultures remains. Today, rising convective currents sweep across the flat lands and up the face of the mounds at Winterville (ca. 1000–1450), north of Greenville. There, earliest builders created a temple knoll that now stands at fifty-five feet in height, constructed entirely of earth with twenty-two supporting mounds constructed for religious ceremonies and ritual games, eighteen of which remain. The games continue, thoroughly transformed: ironically, the latter-day Choctaw nation has built a major hospitality complex, the Pearl River Resort, consisting of casinos and contemporary hotels by prominent architects close by its mythical spring point, approximately twenty-six miles from Nanih Waiya. Neon pulses near the silent, sacred Choctaw birthplace formerly punctuated by wind, lightning, and calling birds.

Adaptation to time and to place mark Mississippi’s architectural history. Early Spanish exploration in the first half of the sixteenth century left few discernible marks in the land, but two hundred years later, in the eighteenth century, Europeans breached the native landscape and settled in. On the Gulf Coast, the French established a beachhead near today’s Ocean Springs, Mississippi, on the east side of Biloxi Bay in 1699, at Fort Maurepas. Today, one documented house from early French colonial settlement remains, built by a German immigrant and famously, erroneously known as the Old Spanish Fort. In Mississippi’s initial European structures, the French quickly altered a Norman house type to a radically different climate. Contemporary scholarship suggests that the La Plante-Krebs house (1757), a single-story timber house under a broad roof in two parts, joins the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans (ca. 1727) as the oldest structures from the French colonial period in the extended Mississippi valley. Parts of Mississippi remained under French influence until the mid-eighteenth century.

Subsequent generations improvised and adjusted to the sticky heat. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mississippi served as a kind of laboratory for an evolving house type. The raised cottage, a distillation of regional adaptation more often popularly associated with Louisiana, flourished throughout the Mississippi valley and the Atlantic seaboard and made its way up the enlaced waterways of Mississippi itself. Contemporary scholars have proposed that these raised cottages, in iconic residences such as Richmond (ca. 1832) in Natchez and along the Mississippi River, inland up the Tombigbee with numerous examples inland at Columbus, and following the Atlantic seaboard as far as New York, represent a distinctive adaptation to warm, damp environments. Consisting of high-ceilinged wood-frame dwelling spaces above masonry ground floors, with porches and overhanging roofs to catch breezes, they form a sophisticated response to place and climate, a kind of “uber-vernacular.”

Imagine the shock as New Yorkers, New Englanders, and even Virginians experienced a Mississippi August, with torrential downpours and still, hot days. In high style and more modest residences, adaption to climate followed in grand and simpler houses. High ceilings promoted air movement upward, and overhanging roofs shielded walls from direct sunlight and heavy rains, while large operable windows and doorways with jib windows opening out to porches caught available breezes. The houses worked.

Early settlers described hardwood forests so dense that sunlight barely dappled through. Log houses provided a first, modular solution to quick shelter for all classes of builders. But sophisticated building came early to the state. Sawmills and brick kilns allowed a range of construction types. Peter Little’s sawmill in Natchez grew from its inception in 1828 to become one of the largest in a quadrant of the United States dubbed the Old Southwest. At the Cedars, a house built in northeast Mississippi along Andrew Jackson’s Military Road ca. 1818–20, the owners enlarged what had been a pioneer structure and covered the original logs together with new additions in sawn wood siding in 1835, a signal of increasing prosperity and urban ordinance.

Who actually constructed these houses and churches and public buildings? While planters sometimes imported skilled artisans from the east coast or Irish plasterers, African American craftspeople formed the backbone of the workforce. Some translated skills into freedom. In Columbus, Thomas and Isaac Williams, freedmen of color, provided construction services and amassed enough wealth of their own to build their own raised cottage near the heart of the town. John Jackson, an enslaved African American, working for the Weldon brothers from Natchez, contributed to the design and construction of the Warren County Courthouse in Vicksburg (1858) and the Hinds County Courthouse in Raymond, Mississippi, ca. 1857–59, as well as bridges and other important structures.

With the advent of increasing wealth and settlement, the state’s access to national ideas and trends resulted in rapid deployment of a mature architecture. Natchez, with its bi-directional river traffic and trade, frequently and easily imported talent and ideas to house its increasingly rich planter class. Styles shifted. The Greek Revival, a national phenomenon widely recognized and studied, swept into the state in the 1830s, replacing the neoclassical adaptation of Federal style, such as seen in the Natchez houses Gloucester (ca.1803–1806) and Arlington (1803). Soon, representatives of a cornucopia of “styles” filled the towns with Tudor and Gothic Revival, Moorish, Romanesque, and the generalized “Italianate.” These picturesque explorations, a national expression of emerging taste, as prevalent in New Haven, Connecticut, as in Holly Springs, combined on Mississippi’s streets and estates in large houses and in cottages, to form walkable towns with distinctive character and individualized personalities.

Illustrated books spread the styles. Across the country and into the South, building styles became popularized by contemporary publications like Godey’s Ladies Book and disseminated by authors like landscape architect and horticulturist Alexander Jackson Downing, who collaborated with architect A. J. Davis on influential books like the pattern book Cottage Residences in 1842. Mississippians built dream houses that had only been promised in print. Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan’s “Moorish” wonderment, an octagonal oriental villa—the mansion Longwood (1861) in Natchez—jumped from the printed page of Sloan’s 1852 book, The Model Architect, tailored and constructed by Sloan for Dr. Haller Nutt to jaw-dropping near completion. In Oxford, New York architect Calvert Vaux’s plans for an Italianate villa resulted in an urban oasis in a private park out from the city’s center called Ammadelle (1859). The wealthy small towns of Columbus, Vicksburg, Port Gibson, Holly Springs, and Aberdeen shared the polyglot expressions of wealth and changing tastes.

Following the carnage and the rebuilding after the Civil War, in which certain towns had faced severe disruption if not destruction, others bombardment (Vicksburg), and some entirely spared (Aberdeen, Holly Springs, Columbus), the nation’s eclectic tastes grew, aided by advances in construction and domestic technology with residences and public edifices of a dizzying array. Queen Anne, Eastlake, and Second Empire buildings, bestowed with elaborate jigsaw work, turrets, and cast-iron elbowed their way out elm-lined streets, stretching along new trolley lines to public parks and race grounds.

Railroads further imported people and ideas. In the 1890s, two important Shingle style houses appeared in Ocean Springs, a small town whose development and growth was abetted by a rail connection to New Orleans, and by extrapolation from there via the Illinois Central, to Chicago and the central United States. The product of the Chicago office of Adler and Sullivan in 1890 and later in 1897 (following a destructive fire), the Jacob Charnley House, constructed for a wealthy Chicago client remains. Sullivan’s own retreat, his bungalow in Ocean Springs, held a place of passionate solace for the architect: “The paradise, the poem of spring, Louis’s other self,” he wrote in his 1924 autobiography. Frank Lloyd Wright, employed by Sullivan at the time, laid claim to the home’s design as did Sullivan. While Hurricane Katrina pulverized Sullivan’s own house in 2005, the Charnley-Norwood House has been extensively restored and rebuilt.

Trains brought optimism and faith in progress as the economy haltingly shifted from agriculture. Mississippi’s transformative hopes centered on Meridian, its largest city, which enjoyed a “golden age” of growth from 1890 until the 1910s. Poised at the nexus of five railroad lines, Meridian’s Union Station (1906) employed the stylish Mission Revival as a symbol of contemporaneous thinking and vision. Subsequently the city would leap upward (the commanding sixteen-story Threefoot Building of 1929 by Claude Lindsley) in the Art Deco mode, an opera house, major retail and industrial infrastructure for its manufacturing and commercial interests.

While Meridian’s promised metropolitan hegemony failed to materialize later into the century, this anomaly among Mississippi cities and towns maintained a tradition of excellent modern architectural design, a spirit that carried through the twentieth century. Practitioners like Chris Risher Sr., produced distinguished examples of commercial and institutional buildings in the nascent International Style. A new generation of Mississippi architects, including native son Samuel Mockbee, and Risher’s son, Chris Risher Jr., added to the state’s architectural dialogue and heritage. In a nod to shifting transportation needs, architect G. Williamson Archer helped renovate Union Station as a late twentieth-century multimodal center.

As Jackson, the state capital, overcame Meridian in the 1920s as the state’s influential center, the profession of architecture grew in prominence. Few individuals had as pronounced a contribution in the early twentieth century than Jacksonian N. W. Overstreet. This prolific architect worked for over fifty years, producing a large body of commanding institutional and large-scale commercial work. His earliest projects, eclectic in design, nevertheless brought a monumental clarity, combining elements of the Prairie Style and Neoclassicism to projects such as the Alcorn County courthouse (1918) in Corinth, as well as courthouses in Webster, Pontotoc, and Harrison counties. Many Overstreet designs remain, stalwart foundations of town squares, as well as imaginative early skyscrapers like the Plaza building in Jackson and a wealth of schools.

In the Depression, when construction activity might have completely stalled, public projects sponsored by federal agencies such as post offices and multiple new schools sponsored by municipalities continued to appear. Overstreet’s employee in 1926, then partner from the years 1931 to 1939, Tulane-trained Louisianan A. Hays Town brought complementary design finesse to Overstreet’s office, populating Mississippi with expressions of forceful modernity. New methods and materials such as reinforced concrete lent weight and presence to projects like Bailey Junior High in Jackson, featured in Life magazine, or Tupelo’s Church Street School, or the skillful Columbia High School, sponsored by the Public Works Administration, and recognized by the French architectural journal, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. With equal dexterity, Town mastered the language of masonry neoclassical form, like the Carrie Stern School in Greenville, or the entire new campus of the Mississippi State Hospital (Whitfield) near Jackson. Together, Overstreet and Town dominated the practice of architecture, in some ways setting the pattern for the professional practice of architecture.

Unlike Overstreet, who completed his studies at the University of Illinois, throughout most of the twentieth century, students motivated to study architecture typically attended architecture schools in the southeast with state stipends: Tulane, LSU, Auburn, or Georgia Tech. A new generation of scholarship awaits analysis and documentation of the work by successful offices, like that of William I. Rosamond in Columbus, Henry “Buddy” Fountain in Biloxi, the Canizaros in Jackson and Oxford, Matt Virden and Joe Weilenman in Greenville, or Biggs/Weir in Jackson. With a type of myopia, many of their midcentury buildings, designed by talented designer architects associated with their firms such as Fred Harrison in Columbus, or Paul Roberson in Greenville, have been compromised, neglected, or lost.

The state committed to stanch its talent flow in 1973 when Mississippi inaugurated its own school of architecture. With backing by the Board of Trustees of the Institutions of Higher Learning, a representative body from the American Institute of Architects, at the behest of Robert V. M. Harrison, a Jackson architect, visited the campus of Mississippi State University. Kicked off with vigor by its first dean, William McMinn, subsequently the school has achieved accreditation and has graduated distinguished alumni, women and men who are enriching towns and communities, whether in New York or Greenwood.

One Mississippi architect’s work has risen to international stature because of the poetic creativity of his vision and his lifetime commitment to noble buildings for all. Samuel Mockbee, born in Meridian, an Auburn graduate, returned to Mississippi in 1977 with a soul on fire for artful justice. After practicing in and around Jackson and Madison County and garnering national attention, he left the state in 1993 to co-found Auburn’s Rural Studio in Hale County, Alabama. Mockbee insured that students could soak up the loamy richness of the South, then return their talents to the communities they would serve. Twenty-six years later, this model of education, which he labeled a “Redneck Taliesin,” has brought writers, artists, musicians, to decades of students in a program that stresses hands-on building. His personal legacy, community-based architectural education, has inspired numerous schools in the United States and abroad, earning him international recognition through a MacArthur Grant and the highest accolade possible in 2004 from the American Institute of Architects, the Gold Medal.

While the litany of early architects has been primarily male, historic preservation owes its genesis in large part to women. When the state’s governor’s mansion was threatened with demolition in the early days of the twentieth century, a group of “patriotic” women rallied to its cause and saved it. Likewise, for other reasons, in 1932, women organized the state’s first major pilgrimage to antebellum homes in Natchez, bringing national attention to Mississippi’s treasury of distinguished domestic architecture. Subsequently, historic preservation grew as a movement with supporters. Today, the Historic Preservation Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History serves as Mississippi’s State Historic Preservation Office, a major factor in documenting and guarding the state’s architectural heritage.

Historic preservation followed a needed pathway toward racial inclusion in the twenty-first century, begun by projects such as Jackson’s Medgar Evers house and with the preservation of the Tallahatchie County courthouse. Belinda Stewart, a Eupora-based architect, helped Tallahatchie County preserve the structure and transform it into a national memorial. The courthouse, located in Sumner, Mississippi, is the place where Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were tried and acquitted for the murder of Emmett Till, the young fourteen-year-old African American whose death sparked international outrage and fueled the civil rights movement.

Preservation often recognizes excellence. While the work of Mississippi architects comprises the bulk of new building throughout the state, surprising twentieth-century work by “imported” talent lies off the major roads. A litany of the country’s and the world’s best architects in the twentieth century count projects in the state. Detroit-based Gunnar Birkerts designed dormitories and a library, and outlined a futuristic master plan for Madison County’s Tougaloo College between 1965 and 1972; Max Bond designed a major residential complex at Mary Holmes College near West Point (1968); and in Biloxi, the architect Frank Gehry designed the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art campus, built between 2004 and 2014. Bruce Goff’s W. C. Gryder house (1960) in Ocean Springs, a luxuriant lavender, organic ensemble, has been compared to an orchid. Beyond his earlier work with Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a significant house in Jackson. Pinecote Pavilion at the Crosby Arboretum in Picayune, designed by Arkansas native E. Fay Jones, almost floats within its naturalistic landscape, his timber structure conjoined with a rich natural landscape design creating a marriage of woodland and water.

This rich landscape, verdant and productive, well watered and temperate, can shift in a moment, sometimes violently. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mississippi can count four of the largest natural disasters in the history of the United States within its borders, borne by water and wind—the greatest flood (1927), the Tupelo tornado (1939), and hurricanes Camille and Katrina. Each has affected its building culture.

In 2020, challenges remain for the built environment. In addition to its travails in the Civil War in the nineteenth century, eliminating slavery in the nineteenth century and segregation in the twentieth, the state still experiences an intransigent poverty, inadequate housing and infrastructure that contrast dramatically with its architectural legacy and new construction. Mississippi’s changing climate and society’s inarguable social disparities call for architects and architecture that provide safety, create as well as employ energy, ennoble its citizens, and forge community. While marked by historic struggle, Mississippi has faced into its complex past and inaugurated a major new structure to tell its story. The Two Mississippi Museums (2018), housing the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, locks twin narratives in a conjoined physical embrace on a bluff overlooking the Pearl River plain and downtown Jackson, a witness to the state’s stormy, culturally rich past and a signal of another day.