Leaves

Green Leaves is best recognized as one of the most valuable national documents of mid-nineteenth century taste in the South, with its remarkable and extensive preserved memorabilia and furnishings. The interior is notable for both its original integrity and includes many period architectural features, along with period decorative arts and contents which together make it one of the most significant historic interiors in Natchez.

The carpet, wallpaper and rosewood and mahogany furniture have not been changed since the early 1850s. Of particular note, throughout the home sports Cornelius, Baker, and Company light fixtures and chandeliers, original gasoliers from one of the most prestigious lighting companies of the era, they remain intact and electrified.

Perhaps no house in Natchez is more suitably named than Green Leaves, it has been occupied since 1849 by six generations of the Koontz-Beltzhoover family since George Washington Koontz came to Natchez from Washington, Pa., in 1836 at the age of 20.

The name was inspired by Lyle Saxon, author of several books about the Deep South. In the 1920s, when the late Ruth Audley Beltzhoover was president of the local garden club, Saxon was in Natchez getting material for his book, “Old Louisiana.” He asked to see Mrs. Beltzhoover’s gardens. When she said, “It is only a garden of green leaves,” his reply was so elo- quent that she named the home Green Leaves.

Appropriately, the house is set in the midst of live oaks, magnolia, cypress, azaleas and camellias. The 400-year-old oak in the rear courtyard spreads a canopy of living green over the grounds.

This National Register home was built by E.P. Fourniquet in 1838 at the then exorbitant cost of $25,000 and further embellished by George W. Koontz in the mid19th century. A raised cottage, it is approached from Rankin Street by two flights of steep steps.

On each side of the front columned porch are wings with lacy iron balconies, added by Koontz. The stately front door of cypress is set in a monumental frame with Corinthian pilasters on each side.

The sidelights are of alternating circular and diamond-shaped panels.

Across the rear of Green Leaves is a wide gallery with large columns and banisters. The rooms on the back all open by jib windows onto the gallery. Forming the rear courtyard are the bedroom wing added by Koontz and the two-story brick kitchen building, which in the 19th century was joined to the house by a covered passageway.

Soon after George Koontz arrived in Natchez he became affiliated with William Britton and, in time, he became president of the Britton & Koontz Bank. In 1845, he married Mary Roane Beltzhoover who became parents to eight children, whose descendants still live at Green Leaves.

On the outskirts of Natchez, deep among forest trees heavy with Spanish moss, stands the largest and most captivating octagonal house in America, the “Oriental Villa” called Longwood.

Planned in 1859 for cotton nabob Haller Nutt and his wife, Julia, by Philadelphia’s distinguished architect Samuel Sloan, the mansion was begun in 1860.

Using the octagon form with four main floors, a fifth-story solarium and a sixth-story observatory, the structure was designed to have 32 rooms, each with its own entrance onto a balcony.

Inside, as a core to provide ventilation and light, was a great rotunda open to the clerestory six floors above.

On the main or principal floor were to be eight rooms, including a drawing room, banquet hall, library, reception room and a special apartment for Mrs. Nutt. Connecting the levels was to be a grand spiral staircase.

Crowning the whole was a Byzantine-Moorish dome with a 24-foot finial reaching heavenward. The lavish exterior was to be only a hint of the magnificence foreseen in the interior.

Work progressed rapidly, and when the gigantic shell was up, the exultant Mr. Nutt wrote to Sloan, “It is creating much admiration,” and proudly predicted that “after this the Octagon will be the style!”

In April 1861, all his hopes and dreams were smashed by the declaration of the war.

Sloan’s Philadelphia craftsmen dropped their saws and hammers and fled North to pick up rifles and bayonets, never to return.

Dejectedly, Nutt and a few local workers completed the basement level. This area, where a wine cellar, school room, recreation room and office were to have been, was converted into living quarters for the Nutts and their eight children. Here they lived in nine rooms as war swirled across the South.

On June 15, 1864, Haller Nutt died in the basement of his unfinished mansion.

The diagnosis was pneumonia, but legend insists that he died of a broken heart over his dream house.

Julia and the children lived on in the cellar doing only a minimum to maintain the great hulk looming over them. She died in 1897 and was buried beside her husband in the Longwood family cemetery.

Grandchildren owned Longwood until 1968.

Today it is maintained, yet unfinished, by the Pilgrimage Garden Club.

The average visitor will ask, “Why not finish it now?”

The answer comes, “No, leave it as a monument to the heart-rending break of the War Between the States. Let it mark the end of an era.”

Longwood, located on Lower Woodville Road, was described as “a remembrancer of Eastern magnificence” by its architect in 1861.

Longwood has been designated a National Historic Landmark, a Mississippi Landmark and a historic site on the Civil War Discovery Trail.

Magnolia Hall is an imposing home in the Greek Revival style. It has been restored in recent years to a historically accurate exterior. One of the most beautiful ceiling medallion designs in all of Natchez, with arabesques of magnolia leaves and blossoms incorporated into their design. Magnolia Hall derives its name from these spectacular decorative works of art, and they are not to be missed.

As one of the finest examples of Greek Revival style in Natchez, the house features a hooded doorway and a well-proportioned portico with massive Ionic columns. The upper deck of the portico is enclosed with wrought-iron banisters. Henderson had his new brick house stuccoed, painted brown and scored to imitate the brownstone so popular in the northeast at the time. The lower floor of the main structure contains six rooms, including a library, double drawing rooms, a banquet hall, a private sitting room and a bedroom. The wide hall is lofty and has a mahogany-railed stair leading to the upper floor, where there are six more large rooms.

Built in 1858 by Thomas Henderson, a 60-year-old widower at the time and a