T

ime moves slowly

in Columbus, Mississippi, a small town

in the heart of the South. Gene Imes was

born and raised here; he remembers

riding horses in the pastures around

Rosedale—an imposing country man-

sion that hadn’t changed since it was

built in 1856. Designed in the pictur-

esque Italian Villa style following an

architectural plate from Samuel Sloan’s

1852 pattern book Victorian Buildings, it

has bracketed eaves, arched windows,

and a square tower (based on the classic

Italian campanile, or bell tower).