Georgianna
Restoring a Raised Planter’s Cottage in the Mississippi Delta
By W. Briar Jones, AIA
The meticulous restoration of Georgianna, a circa 1850 raised planter’s cottage located outside of Cary, Mississippi into a hunting retreat involved a dedicated team of owners, architects, historians, builders and craftspeople. The painstaking process of saving this badly deteriorated landmark took nearly three years.
The Weissenger family, owners since the 1930s, recognized the architectural significance of Georgianna and offered the house, free of charge, to anyone willing to take on the restoration. In 2017, preservation enthusiast Francis C. Lee picked up the gauntlet. He hired the late Dr. Michael Fazio to document the home’s history and to prepare a nomination for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Lee commissioned me as the architect and retained George Fore as architectural conservator. MidState Construction brought electricity, plumbing and mechanical systems to the house for the first time. They helped transform the restoration plans into a marvel of modern conveniences encased in an accurate historic context. As proof, the house was awarded a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.
The National Register nomination documents the architectural characteristics of the structure as well as the history and functions of the property. The Hunt family of Sharkey County constructed Georgianna adjacent to Deer Creek, which provided vital commercial access to the Mississippi River. “King David” Hunt was a large landholder who used the labor of over 2,000 enslaved Black people to grow cotton on numerous plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. This particular parcel, known as Hunt’s Plantation, was given as a gift to Hunt’s son George and wife Anna, hence the name Georgianna. The house has witnessed the Civil War, transfer of the property to Black tenant farmers, a changing agricultural economy and the 1927 floodwaters.
By the early 2000s, the house’s soft brick foundation and masonry walls were decayed and near collapse. This required immediate stabilization and posed the greatest restoration challenge – the brick had to be remade or matched, mortar analyzed and duplicated, and skilled masons retained. The four rooms of the ground floor, divided by large open brick fireplaces, contained crucial historic evidence. Here were vital clues not only to the original structure but also the enslaved people who toiled cooking, serving food and performing other domestic work in the kitchen.
A special feature of the ground floor is the original masonry cistern and its cast iron cistern cover stamped with its date of manufacture: “1848 J.E. Hemphill, Natchez.” The cistern, still in good shape, would have been filled with water collected from the roof through downspouts attached to charcoal filter boxes whose outlines remained. Openings in the masonry walls for windows and doors were formed with heavy timber jambs, lintels, and sills. Components of two original doors, fragments of floor joists and a stringer from the missing sets of stairs to the first floor survived and provided sufficient evidence for recreation.
The raised first floor is made up of four rooms, two on either side of a large central hall terminated by solid doors. The rooms on the first floor were divided by double, central masonry fireplaces with simple cypress mantels and storage cabinets. The one intact mantel, as well as remnants of stair railings, moldings, hardware and trim fragments from the south gallery, were used to recreate the original elements. Efforts were also made to retain features that are essential to telling the story of the structure and its inhabitants, such as two bullet holes in the north exterior door where legend has it that the overseer that lived in the house during Emancipation was fatally wounded.
Fore’s work on the historic finish analysis provided a wealth of knowledge about the materials used to coat the building’s surfaces. Fore’s report concluded that the house was last painted in the 1930s. Microscopic analysis revealed that the trim was painted with an off-white oil primer with an off-white finish matted with turpentine. There was evidence of blue-green color on the balustrade handrail, which was likely also painted on the missing shutters. Additional evidence indicated the stair risers were a medium blue-gray color, while baseboards on the first floor were a medium blue color. Mantels were a charcoal grey color.
The original floor plan of Georgianna presented a logical layout for club member rooms: the ground floor was converted into four private rooms, while the first floor afforded space for a kitchen, living area and two private rooms. The greatest programmatic challenge in the house was the lack of space for bathrooms and mechanical systems. The solid masonry walls on the ground floor and the solid cypress plank walls on the first floor left no place to run electrical wiring, plumbing, ductwork or mechanical units. However, the opportunity for creative solutions was presented by the collapse of the original brick chimneys and reuse of original closets.
MidState Construction began the restoration by shoring and lifting the timber frame of the ground floor walls. Once the house was lifted, some of the walls on the east and west were deemed to be structurally unsound, though the brick was salvaged. Reinforced concrete footings were installed under all of the existing masonry walls. The timber lintels and frames were labeled, removed and repaired. Underground electrical conduits and ductwork was installed to serve the ground floor. Footings were installed to support the new steel frame which supported the fireplaces and chimneys above.
Wherever possible, surfaces, hardware and architectural elements were retained, salvaged, replicated and/or restored by master craftsmen to preserve the historic fabric of the building. Painters worked with the identified, historically accurate colors and unfamiliar materials such as distemper paint. MidState Construction completed the project May 13, 2020 after 17 months of work.
Our team is proud of the incredible effort to not only restore Georgianna but to also retain the original architectural features essential for honoring the plantation’s significant African American history and status as one of Mississippi’s important antebellum landmarks.
Learn More:
Francis C. Lee first became intrigued with Georgianna after reading Alan Huffman’s story on the history of the house in the Winter 2017 issue of Elevation, which is available at mississippiheritage.com.
The National Register nomination for Georgianna has a wealth of information and can be found at mdah.ms.gov.