Day 2 in Natchez - Longwood, Hawthorne, and Brandon

What a lovely day in Natchez-sunny and 79 degrees!  

We began our day at Longwood-the largest and most captivating octagonal house in America.

Longwood, also known as Nutt's Folly, is an historic antebellum octagonal mansion located at 140 Lower Woodville Road in Natchez, Mississippi, USA. The mansion is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, and is a National Historic Landmark.  Longwood is the largest octagonal house in the United States.

Samuel Sloan, a Philadelphia architect, designed the home in 1859 for cotton planter Dr. Haller Nutt.[8] Work was halted in 1861 at the start of the American Civil War. Dr. Nutt died of pneumonia in 1864, leaving the work incomplete. Of the thirty-two rooms planned for the house, only nine rooms on the basement floor were completed.

Haller Nutt's never-finished Natchez home, Longwood, was the last burst of southern opulence before war brought the cotton barons' dominance to an end. Longwood survived decades of neglect and near-abandonment to become one of Natchez' most popular attractions.

In 2010, Longwood was used in the HBO series True Blood for the external shots of the fictional Jackson, Mississippi mansion of Russell Edgington, the Vampire King of Mississippi and Louisiana.

Next we visited Hawthorne.  We were greeted by Betty Jenkins- the owner on the porch.  Her son Rusty gave us the history their house.

Built in 1814, Hawthorne is a Natchez landmark. Surrounded by majestic live oaks, this Federal style estate has grounds that are as beautiful as its interior.  The home has four identical elliptical fanlight doorways and magnificent live oaks and park like grounds.

And finally Brandon Hall.

Majestic Brandon Hall was formally a large working cotton plantation located on the scenic Natchez Trace. The land on which Brandon Hall now stands first passed into private ownership as a royal grant from the Spanish King Carlos III in 1788. In 1809 the property was sold at public auction to William Lock Chew for the sum of $7,000. Chew constructed the first permanent dwelling consisting of a three room brick house about twenty by sixty feet, built sometime between 1809 and 1820. This structure still exists as the "basement" of the present house known as Brandon Hall.

In 1833 Chew sold the property to Nathaniel Hoggatt, a successful planter whose daughter Charlotte inherited the land after his death. On October 29, 1840, Charlotte Hoggatt married Gerard Brandon III, who was the son of an early Governor of Mississippi and the grandson of a Revolutionary War Hero of the same name. They lived in this original dwelling until 1853, when they began construction of Brandon Hall which was completed in 1856.

In January 1914, the plantation, house, and land was sold to George Hightower as a result of a default on a promissory note, thus ending an 81 year chain of ownership by the Brandon and Hoggatt families. These 81 years extended from Mississippi's frontier days during the period of grace and plenty before the Civil War, and through the South's darkest hours after the war.

From 1914 until the present, Brandon Hall Plantation has had ten owners. In 1987 the home was completely renovated and restored, perfectly duplicating the original construction.

Here's the Joyful Noise group in Natchez!

Tune in tomorrow for more historic southern treasures from Natchez...