Dunleith

Dunleith is the mansion lightning built — twice, in a sense. Job Routh's 18th-century house Routhland stood on the Natchez ground first; his daughter Mary, widowed at fifteen, brought it to her second husband Charles Dahlgren. When lightning struck the chimney in 1855 and Routhland burned, Dahlgren built its replacement in 1856 — the Greek Revival house that stands now, encircled by twenty-six giant Tuscan columns. Mary died in it shortly after it was finished.

The house that came next carried the whole plantation register — Dahlgren sold to Alfred Vidal Davis for $30,000 to settle the estate, and Davis gave it the Scottish name it kept. It's the only Mississippi antebellum mansion still standing with the full peripteral colonnade — the Louisiana-style house form whose sisters, Windsor and Uncle Sam and Greenwood, are all ruins or gone. Forty acres inside the city limits, the carriage house and service wing and Gothic outbuildings still with it.

Now it's the Dunleith Historic Inn — the National Historic Landmark doing double duty as Natchez's grandest hotel, the Castle restaurant in the old carriage house. The file keeps the guests' reports as guests' reports — the harp-playing apparition, the children's footsteps on the attic floor, the weeping woman in what was the quarters — against the harder record: a plantation house where the people who built it worked it enslaved, in a town that has made its architecture its industry.

Dunleith is the archive's colonnade file — the only Mississippi antebellum mansion still fully ringed by its giant columns, built on Routhland's ashes in 1856, now a landmark inn where guests report harp music and the record holds the plantation underneath.