Lost Mansions of Mississippi, Volume II

Austin Moore House

{ 50 } Marshall County was the epicenter of the land rushthatfollowedthetransferof sixmillionacres of Chickasaw land from that tribe to the U.S. government. On October 20, 1832, the signature of Chief Ishtehotopa was barely dry before settlers and speculators from the old Atlantic Coast states rushed pell-mell into north Mississippi, frantic to scoop up the available plots that were going for a little more than a dollar an acre. The younger sons of old-line planters, too far down the line of primogeniture to hope for a reasonable stake in their home states, pulled away from their families and all that was familiar to head west to this new world. They found a wide-open wilderness with no towns and no social structure to speak of, and opportunities abounded for those clever enough to visualize the most promising sites. Whitmel Sephas Randolph and Samuel Ramsey McAlexander were two of the first entrepreneurs to recognize the attributes of a large holly grove and its nearby spring. By October 1835, Mississippi newspapers were advertising the sale of lots in the brand-new town of Holly Springs, touted as offering “more advantages . . . and inducements for the locations of a town than any other place now known in the Chickasaw Nation.”1 More than eight hundred square miles would be carved into Marshall County, and within two years, it would boast the largest white population in the entire state, growing from fewer than four thousand settlers to almost fourteen thousand. Holly Springs itself claimed more than fifteen hundred citizens in 1837, making it the third-largest town in Mississippi, trailing only Natchez and Vicksburg. Schools for boys and girls were chartered , churches were organized, and the first of the elaborate mansions that have characterized Holly Springs and Marshall County ever since were beginning to appear. Austin E. Moore’s home northwest of Holly Springs was never the grandest of the antebellum structures that dotted the Marshall County map, but it was built with the profits from the great building boom of the 1830s and 1840s. Austin and his older brother, Henry, relocated with their families from North Carolina to north Mississippi and initially built simple log houses. Austin’s sawmill on the Coldwater River planed the lumber and boards that went into the new homes, churches, schools, and public buildings that were springing up in Holly Springs, Red Banks, Wyatt, and Galena. The permanent homes which Austin and Henry Moore eventually built were very similar , according to family lore. Esther Cannon, a descendant of Austin Moore, described his house 150 years after its construction: Austin Moore House • • • { 51 } aUstin Moore HoUse The house had four large rooms with a wide hallway through the center downstairs and the same upstairs, plus front porches about 12’ x 12’. As usual in those days the kitchen was a small building in the back yard. In my day a kitchen had been built on the northwest corner of the house. There were four tall brick chimneys providing wood fireplaces for each of the eight rooms, two tall windows in each room, both hallways closed in in my day, and two stairways—one from downstairs hall to upstairs hall, the other from northwest downstairs room to room above. There were no doors from upstairs rooms on the west to the upstairs hall, separating boys from girls. The original building provided no closets , wardrobes being used for storage. It was years before electricity was provided through the country. Kerosene lamps gave light, a brick cellar served as refrigerator, a cistern and wells provided water, and wood fires were used for heat and cooking. The parlor , east room downstairs, was carpeted, as was the “company” bedroom upstairs. Painted shades—very fragile in my time—were at the parlor windows, a mantel painted to resemble marble inside. The large front yard and half of the backyard had tall cedar trees planted in rows, like the trees in the William Faulkner yard in Oxford.2 The home which Mrs. Cannon describes was typical for a prosperous Marshall County merchant or farmer of the mid-1800s. Census records from 1850 indicate that Austin E. Moore had nine living children and owned fifteen slaves, hardly enough to elevate him into the elite planter status but nevertheless a sign of financial stability. The flush years for Marshall County and Holly Springs didn’t end abruptly with the onset of the Civil War in 1861. Until the spring of 1862, schools stayed open,houses were built,and...