Natchez: Glenfield

By Ed Piper

I had never been to an antebellum mansion before--I thought--until we toured Longwood, an attractive though unfinished mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, in April 2017.

(My wife later reminded me we had toured Andrew Jackson's estate, The Hermitage, near Nashville, years before. I also later recalled that I had rented a car to drive from a Presbyterian conference in Louisville to Lexington, Kentucky for the day, and visited Henry Clay's estate there, complete with preserved slave quarters.)

Which is a long lead-in to our experience touring Glenfield, another antebellum mansion in Natchez. Though not well-restored like other sites we visited, this one was highlighted by a very spontaneous, off-the-cuff, not-politically-correct tour given by Marjorie, the granddaughter of Gussie Field, who lived in the house as a child.

Glenfield was called Glencannon when Lucy Cannon's father owned it back in the day; "glen" meaning "valley" or "location", the rest of the name an appendage from the surname of the family owning the estate at the particular time.

The delight for Dianna and me on the hour-plus walk was that unlike James, our polished and erudite tour guide at Longwood, Marjorie just let fly whatever came to mind--and sparred with her daughter, Valerie Verna, over various family stories and recollections.

What stuck in my mind, though I took copious notes in a little booklet throughout Marjorie's tour, was her vivid description (passed on to her) of the aggressive and threatening Union pickets who positioned themselves during the Civil War not far from the house.

In the account she gave, the Confederate pickets set up right around the house. Not too far away were the federal soldiers. The latter came knocking--or rather, wanting to barge into the house. Mr. Cannon, the owner, was a committed Confederate and was not about to give permission for the Union men to enter.

Therefore, they shot at the door. The bullet hole in the front door is still visible. And the point in the entry inside the residence where the bullet ricocheted off the wall is preserved, as well. It really makes the story come alive, when you can look down and see the actual hole the bullet made. Quite something.

Well, Marjorie, she got the blood going and spoke as one who feels the injustice of the Yankees forcing their way in is still current. This was no idle history for her, or so it seemed from her impassioned narration of events so long ago.

The other vivid impression I had of the house was that there was no way my wife, who is deathly allergic to dust mites, could have stayed overnight in that house. The reason the thought even came up was that Marjorie and her daughter Valerie live in the house, and there was a visitor from Europe who was staying overnight at the time of our tour. This woman was invited by Marjorie to accompany us on the walk through the house. She was from Germany, I recall, and she spoke good English. She had booked a room in the house for several days on her vacation. No way Dianna and I could have stayed, with the dust pretty apparent from the moment I came inside the door.

We learned a lot of the spirit and fervor of Southerners, I felt, from this tour alone. It was enjoyable for the fact of its authenticity. It was not a watered-down, no-rough-edges tour. (The next day we toured Melrose, administered by the National Park Service and lavishly restored with Park Service money. We got a very different view of antebellum and Civil War times from the African-American employees there.)

Visiting this site also helped give us a broader view of antebellum mansions in general, as Marjorie made clear that there just wasn't money they have to put into restoration. You could still imagine the grandeur of the place in old times, but you saw it through the lack of badly-needed repairs of the roof and grounds in general that is the present state of the place.

I had hoped to come to this site to see slave quarters, now remembering that I had been able to see the slave quarters at Henry Clay's estate years before in Lexington. But, alas, the present property doesn't include any of that. In fact, the fields that slaves would have worked are no longer part of the property either. To see an intact antebellum mansion, with fields and slave quarters, is a special historical thing indeed. (Melrose does have the slave quarters. The buildings have been restored, but they are not decorated or furnished in any way inside the structures.)