Melrose

The collapse came on schedule. The McMurrans, financially hurt and grieving several dead grandchildren, sold Melrose in December 1865 to George and Elizabeth Davis; John McMurran himself died in a steamboat accident the following year. The Davis descendants — through daughter Julia and her son George Kelly and his wife Ethel — held the estate until 1976, making Melrose a Natchez Pilgrimage centerpiece from the tours' start in 1932. John and Betty Callon bought and restored it after Ethel Kelly's death; the National Park Service acquired it in 1990 as the centerpiece of the new Natchez National Historical Park.

The result is what the file calls the most intact antebellum estate in Natchez: main house, slave quarters, kitchen and dairy dependencies, carriage house, stable, smokehouse, and a large original decorative-arts collection — a National Historic Landmark since 1974, preserved on eighty acres.

The best eyewitness description came from inside the family. Alice Austen — daughter-in-law to the McMurrans and, not incidentally, one of America's earliest serious women photographers — judged Melrose 'very elegant; one of the handsomest places I have seen North or South,' and her late-century photographs document the interiors the park still interprets. The McMurrans' war ended less dramatically than the house's grandeur suggests: a Unionist's household in a Confederate cotton capital, selling up in December 1865 and boarding the steamboats that took the husband's life within the year.

The haunting file is thin, in the manner of federal house museums: figures reported in the house and on the grounds, with the McMurrans themselves the named presence in the retellings. No first report carries a date; the ranger-led interpretation stays with the furniture.

The archive notes the record is already crowded. Melrose's intact quarters and dependencies preserve the estate's whole population — the family in the parlor and the twenty-two enslaved residents of the 1860 census alike — a completeness most Southern sites cannot document. Whatever is said to walk the grounds walks through one of the best-documented households the war left standing.

Natchez itself supplies the ambient lore — a river town whose haunted-house register runs long — but at Melrose the claims stay at the level of reported figures and unexplained impressions among the dependencies. The dossier files them as the estate's weakest documentation, which is, for a National Historic Landmark, a distinction: the wallpaper, the silver, and the slave quarters are all still there to be audited.