Neuse, Ashley, and Cooper (among other seaboard, long-settled places)
there were plantation mansions already old. Most were constructed of brick
and had been rebuilt and/or enlarged several times. Their masters were
progressive farmers proud of fields both expansive and productive. Such
men, with their wives, were usually aesthetes, too, and supervised not only
neat kitchen gardens but manicured greenswards that stretched down to
beaches, and ornamental plantings of trees, shrubs, and flowers in the
styles of the English and the French. Olmsted himself admired James River
mansions and lawns from a steamboat bound eastward toward Norfolk
in . Many of these places endure to this day, sometimes in posses-
sion of the same families who planted the properties in or even long
before. (One thinks of the descendants of John Tyler at Sherwood Forest,
on the James.) Somewhat younger mansions survive farther inland, beside
great rivers that served the first big cotton frontiers—the white-columned
neoclassicals of Macon, Georgia, by the Ocmulgee, for instance, and the
Twickenham neighborhood of Huntsville, Alabama, near the mighty Ten-
nessee. Twickenham’s proprietors proudly open their doors to visitors each
year in an event called Pilgrimage. The wealthiest Americans on the eve of
the Civil War lived in and around Natchez, Mississippi, and across the river
in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. Many of their mansions, too, remain and
are regularly admired by the public during Natchez’s annual Pilgrimage.
Predictably, though, nearly all these notable western estates were young,
new, or still unfinished when the Civil War began. Now they are old, by
American lights, anyway. Interesting and valuable as all these domestic
monuments may be as architecture and artifacts of self-indulgent living by
the few, they misrepresent the region profoundly.
Most southern architecture, even ‘‘big houses,’’ was constructed of wood.
Such as these were, if Yankees did not burn them, friendly fire did, sooner
or later, and if fire did not destroy them, termites did. Builders of such
places often abandoned them to move, too, and if there were no buyers or
squatters to maintain them, big houses succumbed to rot and the weight
of encroaching vegetation. Mobile, ever-westering planters often never got
around to constructing mansions. The dogtrot (or open-hallway) house was
the nineteenth-century double-wide that suited slaveholders on frontiers
well enough. Built of logs or, later and well into the twentieth century, of
sawn boards, dogtrot houses were usually two rooms on the same founda-
tion separated by a covered but otherwise open ‘‘hall,’’ through which a dog
(or almost any creature) might trot. For a year or two or three, a planter and
his white family might live in one room, with slaves in the other. Once for-