Mississippi

Named for owner Helen Johnstone, whose mother had overseen the construction of the Chapel of the Cross (JM10) in Madison County, the two-and-a-half-story wooden Colonial Revival house overlooks extensive farmlands from atop a ceremonial Indian mound. Johnstone married Episcopal priest George C. Harris in 1862, and in 1896 they retired to this plantation, The Helen Place. Reducing the approximately thirty-foot-high Indian mound to twenty feet, they built their house. After it burned in 1906, Stanton immediately constructed a concrete-block house; that too burned before being occupied.

Risher designed many public schools, most often on flat sites where, in a typically modernist fashion, he used long walkways covered by flat-roofed steel canopies to connect flat-roofed, one-story classroom blocks. The sloping ground here called for a more compressed one- and two-story scheme, which Risher organized around two courtyards. His steel-framed building with a flat-roofed steel entrance canopy is faced in red and tan brick, with

Methodist minister John Ford’s two-story clapboard house, then one of the finest country residences in the Pearl River valley, hosted Andrew Jackson on his way to the Battle of New Orleans in 1814 and the Pearl River Convention in 1816, which fixed the boundaries of the new state of Mississippi.

This three-story building is wrapped on two sides by a full-height portico carried on flared, attenuated, stucco-covered steel columns that mimic Gothic stone-vaulted construction. Behind and between the columns, walls are either gray-veined marble or full-height aluminum-framed windows. The New Formalist design was modeled on Minoru Yamasaki’s Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company building (1965) in Minneapolis but perhaps has more resonance here in a locale where white-columned porticos have long been an architectural staple.

This ceremonial site of the Natchez Indians consists of three prehistoric platform mounds, a

Mississippi’s first suburban megachurch is this three-story Classical Revival building, constructed by I. C. Garber. Its initial congregation of about 1,500 grew to over 4,000 through two expansion programs but is now in the low hundreds. A monumental tetrastyle Corinthian portico dominates the E-shaped edifice, which includes two original Sunday school wings. Inside, the auditorium is rectangular with pews curved toward the pulpit, choir loft, and baptistry. James M. Spain added a three-story Sunday school wing on the west in 1948, and in 1958, church member E. L.

An allée of live oak trees announces the entrance to “The Delta’s Garden,” a rarity in a region where industrialized agriculture makes land too valuable to be used for mere pleasure. In 1938, cotton planter Wister Henry donated fourteen acres near the Yazoo River for a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. After the CCC team moved to another work site, Wister and Frances Henry built their Colonial Revival house at the end of the allée and began laying out their fourteen acres to include a lake and plants, including azaleas, roses, crape myrtles, camellias, and fruit trees.

John Alexander Klein’s obituary noted “his great passion for building,” a passion embodied in Cedar Grove, which he developed with an impressive two-story Greek Revival brick house and an estate that retains much of its mid-nineteenth century garden. Klein came to Vicksburg from Virginia in 1836, established a jewelry business, and branched out into sawmills, a cotton compress, and railroads. In 1840, he bought sixty-six acres stretching from the Mississippi River to the bluff, where he began building Cedar Grove.

Marking the first major school consolidation effort in the county, this two-story tan brick structure built by local contractor W. W. Easley Sr. fuses Mediterranean and Craftsman features in a hipped-roofed five-part composition dominated by a central entrance portico and enlivened by decorative window mullions. This is one of Spain’s earliest known designs, but he had already spent two decades as a Mississippi educator and superintendent of schools before receiving architectural degrees from Mississippi A&M and Columbia University. In the early 1920s, he worked for N. W.