Windsor Ruins

Twenty-three Corinthian columns, each 45 feet tall, stand in a cow pasture off a dirt road north of Natchez. They are all that remains of Windsor, once the largest antebellum home in Mississippi. Smith Coffee Daniell II built it in 1861. He died two weeks after moving in. The house survived the Civil War—Union troops used it as an observation post. It burned in 1890 when a party guest dropped a cigarette. What remains is one of the most photographed ruins in the South. The columns stand where cotton money built the biggest thing it could, in a city that became what it was because the river made fortunes possible and because those fortunes required the labor of enslaved people. Windsor is what's left after fire—columns open to weather, marking where something immense stood and then didn't. The site is free and open dawn to dusk, about 30 minutes north of Natchez via the Trace.