Windsor Mansion Ruins, Port Gibson, Mississippi

To those who read and especially those who commented to my first post ever linked to Facebook, a big thanks.  I'd been meaning to do something with the picture of the Ugandan charcoal bike for a while and had been thinking about it for a maybe an article to send to Bicycling magazine, but--alas--along with all my other big plans for writing, it has come to naught.

Here are some pictures that I took at the ruins of the Windsor Plantation mansion outside of Port Gibson, Mississippi.

I headed out there one late afternoon.  The owner of the Isabella Bed and Breakfast advised me not to bike out there because of the nature of the road and terrain, and I was very thankful for that advice.  I got out there when the light was still harsh but hung around by myself (with the exception of a brief visit by a young couple) until it got kind of spooky dark.  As a result of the changing light I kept walking the perimeter of the columns essentially taking the same pictures over and over again hoping to get at least a good one or two.

I think columns have interested me since I learned about them back at Cranbrook.  With the different orders and the rules about proportions, I think it is mixture of art and math that appeals.  I remember as a kid looking at Greek and Roman columns and thinking that they were chiseled out of monolithic chunks of marble.  Seeing the quotidian brick exposed beneath what is left of the stucco exterior seems like an apt metaphor for the Old South.

As I mentioned in early post, I planned on visiting Windsor because of a photograph taken Karekin Goekjian.  We have a print of the photograph signed by Goekjian in our upstairs hallway that was part of the High Museum of Art's "Picturing the South: 1860 to the Present" exhibit during the 1996 Olympics.  However, the first picture I remember of the Windsor Columns was a black-and-white photograph by Eudora Welty that included her back-lit shadow taking the picture before the full complement of columns that was standing at the time (it's remarkable in that picture of few and small trees surrounding the site.   For that picture and a history of the house, the Architecturalist blog has a nice post.

The ruins are an artifact of the Old South, especially the flush, booming years right before the Civil War that led to delusions of grandeur about southern civilization that lead to succession.  Beyond the moral blindness the South had with regard to slavery, the foolish Romanticism of the Old South seems embodied in these structures based upon some vision of ancient Greece and Rome.  Though this house actually survived the war only to be destroyed by carelessly thrown cigarette in the 1890s, the remaining ruins remind me of the wrecked steamship, the Sir Walter Scott, in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is typically read as an emblem of the wrecked Romanticism of the Old South run aground.

And then there's Faulkner, who so masterfully used that failed society and turned used it to build upon the Southern Gothic literary tradition that Poe sorta-kinda started in the nineteenth century.  For as much as Windsor is evocative to me because of the photographs that have come before, it is stark and powerful and sobering because I can't help but recall Thomas Sutpen, Faulkner's Jay Gatsby from Absalom, Absalom!

When I think about the trip I made from Athens to Oxford to Port Gibson to New Orleans and back, I think maybe the 90 minutes I spent at the Windsor Columns will stick most powerfully with me.