Clifton was the Surget family's mansion, set on the bluff north of Natchez-Under-the-Hill with one of the great river views in the South. The Surgets were among the wealthiest families in antebellum America, and Clifton was built to that scale.
It did not fall to a battle. During the Union occupation a Federal officer, John Moulder Wilson, was — accidentally, the accounts say — left off the guest list for a party the Surgets threw. He had the house demolished with explosives. Not shelled in a fight, not burned by accident: blown up, on an officer's order, over an invitation. Nothing was rebuilt on the spot. The name survives on a later, unrelated house and on the street; the mansion itself is one of the few grand Natchez houses that is genuinely gone, and the reason it is gone is the smallest one in the whole catalog of how these places end.
