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{ 96 } Charles Dahlgren built two houses. One is instantly recognizable as a symbol of Natchez and the Greek Revival era. The other was an odd mishmash of Italianate and cottage styles, long forgotten and known only to the most avid students of antebellum architecture. Dahlgren was an intense and volatile character , a Pennsylvania native who mastered the banking trade with financier Nicholas Biddle. He was sent south to the booming new state of Mississippi in 1835, charged with overseeing a branch of the Bank of the United States. This was heady territory for a twenty-four-year-old young man.He quickly figured out that the most reliable entry into the upper reaches of Natchez society was through marriage vows, and before his thirtieth birthday he had married widow Mary Ellis Routh. With Mrs. Routh came her family mansion, Routhlands, ownership of several Louisiana plantations, four children, and sizeable debts. The Dahlgrens’home had been built by Mary Ellis’s father-in-law, Job Routh, in the 1830s. No photographs exist of this house, but it was described in contemporary accounts as one of Natchez’s grander structures, with two stories and galleries on at least two sides. The setting was a seventeen-hundred-acre estate near the southern edge of the city. Charles and Mary Dahlgren lived there with their ever-increasing brood of children for more than a decade. They were vacationing in Saratoga, New York, when word came that Routhlands had burned to the ground. Charles was quick to lay blame on a whim of Mary’s: “[The house] was struck by lightning and destroyed, in consequence of my wife desiring terra cotta chimney tops placed, which were elevated above the surrounding china trees, and so affording an object for the electric fluid.”1 The family returned to Mississippi to find their home a pile of bricks and ashes. Fifteen stuccoed steps marked the site of the main entrance, and a variety of interesting Gothic outbuildings had survived as well. A two-story brick barn and stable, a garage and kennel with a hexagonal columbary, a greenhouse, and a servants ’ lodge all bear witness to what must have been a sensational home, its visage apparently lost before any photographs were taken. Those outbuildings and the orphaned steps remain on the grounds of the house which Charles and Mary Dahlgren built to replace Routhlands. The original house was most likely an impressive sight, but the home that builder John Crothers fashioned has come to be an iconic symbol of Natchez and the Old South. Completed in 1856, the new Routhlands (renamed Dunleith by later owners) is a massive cubical structure, completely encompassed Llangollen • • • { 97 } LLangoLLen by two-story Tuscan columns and an elaborate connecting balustrade. This peripteral column arrangement was so expensive and difficult to balance aesthetically that only two other houses in Mississippi featured it. The Forest was built just south of Natchez by Sir William Dunbar, one of the most innovative of the area’s early settlers . It burned in the 1850s, leaving only three columns. Windsor, near Port Gibson, was the state’s largest house during the three decades that it existed. The fire that destroyed it in 1890 left an outline of Corinthian columns, most of which are still standing. Louisiana had several peripteral Greek Revival homes, including Ashland and Greenwood, and Alabama’s most famous example was Forks of Cypress. Charles Dahlgren, an ambitious transplant from Pennsylvania, had created the ultimate southern mansion, a jewel of symmetry and refinement that has been widely acknowledged as one of America’s finest Greek Revival masterpieces . The family took possession sometime during 1856; Mary would die there of heart disease in March of 1858. Within days, Charles was making plans to leave the mansion behind. His advertisement in the Natchez Daily Courier was small and discreet. “For Sale. My residence Routhlands, including 50 acres of land. Apply on premises. C. G. Dahlgren.” Within months, Alfred Vidal Davis had purchased the property. Erasing all connections with the Routh family and its famous homes, he renamed it Dunleith. Dahlgren moved on with his life, waiting only a socially acceptable time before marrying nineteen-year-old Mary Vannoy of Nashville. Mary was taking on a large collection of Routh and Dahlgren children,and another large house was going to be a necessity. Land was purchased southwest of the Dunleith property and work begun on Llangollen. The name was Dahlgren’s Llangollen was built by Charles Dahlgren, who also built...

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