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{ 22 } East of Highway 61 and south of Interstate 20, a sunken road cuts through the heavily wooded hills of Warren County, carrying the traveler miles and years away from the twenty-first century. The roots of ancient oaks are at eye level, their trunks soaring up and meeting in a dense canopy that filters out all but a few rays of sunlight. The road twists and turns and leads up to a pair of brick posts and an open gate. If the timing is right, a drive through those gates carries the curious visitor into a blaze of spring color, courtesy of 750 azaleas in full flower. Beyond the azaleas is a circle of four magnolias, planted more than a century and a half ago by the same family which has endured war, occupation , soil erosion, boll weevils, and fire in its quest to hang on to this quiet, lovely corner of Mississippi. A 1990s Louisiana Creole cottage now stands where the antebellum mansion, Linden, housed them for more than a century. Linden burned in 1956, leaving only a pile of rubble, and most of the outbuildings disappeared in the subsequent decades. But evidence of their existence remains, in the form of “ruins gardens,”carefully sculpted collections of bricks and mortar, chunks and pieces of melted iron, shattered crockery, and old bolts. In the midst of one is a stone marker, inscribed as follows: “Here amidst the ruins of the original Linden, we dedicate this house to the glory of God and to the memory of Capt. Bryan Willis Brabston Sr., whose great personal sacrifices kept Linden Plantation in our family. 1996.” The Brabston family can trace their ownership of Linden back to the earliest days of Warren County and a fortuitous marriage. Newet Vick, a Methodist minister from Virginia who followed his brothers to the Mississippi territory in its prestatehood years, built a small church at Open Woods, near the Mississippi River bluff village of Walnut Hills. Land speculation seemed an easier path through this life, if not the next, and Vick began accumulating large tracts of land both along the river and further inland. He died of yellow fever before his dreams of a town could be implemented, and it would be up to his thirteen children and their spouses to develop Vicksburg and Warren County. JohnWesleyVick was the second of Reverend Vick’s offspring, and he chose the eleven-hundred -acre swath of forest and rolling pastureland that would come to be known as Linden Plantation . His marriage to Ann Marie Brabston of Washington, Mississippi, ended tragically with her death in childbirth. Vick moved back to the growing community of Vicksburg, where he built a notable house, a two-story gabled mansion with double galleries. He developed an improved cottonseed and owned several of the earliest Delta plantations, including Anguilla. Linden Plantation, which may have already included the house that would be known by that Linden • • • { 23 } Linden name, passed into the possession of Ann Marie Brabston Vick’s brother, James, and his wife, Roche, around 1840. Their home was similar to the one John Wesley Vick enjoyed in Vicksburg, a two-story frame structure with upper and lower galleries on both the east and west façades. It was described a century later by Vicksburg historian Eva Davis: It is built of frame and plaster construction inside and out and is painted a light tan outside. Much of the plaster is still intact after one hundred and ten years. The plaster of paris ornaments in the ceilings of the first floor are still unmarred by time. Two wide verandas, upstairs and down, extend across the entire front and back of the house, supported by square wooden columns. Entering the front door a wide hall extends the full length of the house, from front to back, with rooms on either side. To the right on entering the front door, the double parlors are separated by tall folding doors and are furnished in the manner of the early Victorian period.1 James and Roche Brabston planted the magnolias which still shelter the home at Linden, and she transformed twelve acres of the plantation into formal English gardens and flower beds. The years before the Civil War were full of parties and neighborhood mingling from Vicksburg to the Big Black River. It all came to an abrupt end with Grant’s march into Mississippi in 1863. Ulysses S. Grant had been stymied for months in his attempt to...

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