In the Mississippi city of Natchez, deep among forest trees dripping Spanish moss, stands
an unfinished "Oriental Villa" known as Longwood. Planned in 1859 for
cotton-nabob Dr. Haller
Nutt by Philadelphia’s fashionable architect, Samuel Sloan, this eight-sided castle was begun
in 1860. Work halted abruptly in 1861, when the Confederate bugles echoed across the South.
The Pennsylvanian artisans, busy on the Arabian palace, heeded Mr. Lincoln’s call-to-arms
and immediately dropped saws and hammers, heading North to pick up rifles and bayonets, never
to return. The house is unusual, with its octagonal design and sixteen-sided cupola topped with a
Byzantine onion-shaped dome: yet its novelty and luxury reflected with wealth, prestige and
creativeness
of the affluent Dr. Nutt. The unique Muslim plan had captured the Natchezian’s
imagination and he proudly predicted that "after this the Octagon shape will be in style."
Of the home’s envisioned thirty-two rooms only nine of the ground floor were completed.
One traveler to Natchez, writing in 1863 stated that "The house itself is rather like a pagoda,
but it is beautifully furnished." The twentieth-century traveler will agree.
On the walls are the architect Sloan’s drawings of the mansion as it was to have been, a
six-story structure of brick, plaster and marble with eight rooms on each floor centered around
a rotunda. Indirect lighting was to be provided by large mirrors in the dome reflecting
sunbeams to smaller mirrors to light the gloomy interior below.
Orders to France,
England and Italy had been sent for elaborate furnishings, mosaic floors, marble mantels, statues and
stairways and splendid tapestries. Many of these costly pieces were in route on the high seas
and were seized by the Federal blockade. Today some of these are in national museums.
When the war that suddenly burst upon the nation deprived him of his workmen and
subsequently his wealth, Dr. Nutt dejected settled his family into the lower floor.
Although a Union-sympathizer, the doctor nevertheless saw a million dollars’ worth of rich
cotton land burned or confiscated by Union soldiers. A broken man, he died of pneumonia in
1864 leaving still incomplete his Longwood, "The remembrance of Eastern magnificence which
looms up against the mellowed azure of a Southern sky."
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