| The Harris-Banks House is the most distinctive Italianate-style house as well as one of the most elaborately detailed dwellings in Columbus, a community noted for its highly individualistic expressions of the popular antebellum architectural styles. The design of the house freeely combines elements of the Grecian and the Gothic modes with towered, flat-roofed Italianate form and epitomizes the eclecticism characteristic of many Columbus-area dwellings constructed during the two decades prior to the Civil War. This very distinctive house consists of a two-story, rectangular, hip-roofed wood-frame main block, mostly Greek Revival in character, with an attached three-story octagonal tower rising from an arcaded portico, and delicate attached porches with Gothic detailing. The Harris-Banks House was built for Jeptha Vining Harris, a wealthy cotton planter and statesman, and its remained in the family until 1967. The house was listed individually on the National Register on 16 November 1978, and it was later also listed as an element (#475) of the in the South Columbus Historic District, which was placed on the National Register in 1982. It is included in "Shrines to Yesterday" (1968), "Historic Architecture in Mississippi" (1973) (pp. 128-129). "Old Homes of Mississippi, Volume II: Columbus and the North" (1977) (pp. 37-38), "Reflections: Homes and History of Columbus, Mississippi" (2001) (pp. 110-111), "Great Houses of Mississippi" (2004) (pp.125-130), "The Majesty of Eastern Mississippi and the Coast" (2004) (p.27), and "Buildings of Mississippi" (2020) (pp.185-186, PR27). [HABS: MS-104 (1936)] |