| A very elegant Federal Style cottage. It has an undercut gallery, the roof of which is supported by six Tuscan columns which stand forward of the gallery floor -- this is one of three documented residences in the state to possess detached columns with a recessed gallery. The original drawing room interior is now in the Anglo-American Art Museum at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, La. The following was compiled by Mimi Miller, Historic Natchez Foundation, c.1986: "The 1811 traditional date of the Salisbury-Shepherd House is supported by the stylistic details of the building. The house was built for Captain Moses Hooke, who served in the army under Gen. James Wilkinson and later became a prominent planter in Wilkinson County (HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS OF MISSISSIPPI, Vol. II, p. 758). The un-footnoted National Register nomination for the Salisbury-Shepherd House cites Salisbury Township, Massachusetts, as both Hooke's birthplace and the inspiration for the plantation's name. Moses Hooke died at Salisbury Plantation in 1821, and the house later became the property of his daughter Margaret Ann Hooke and her husband C.M. Shepherd. "The Salisbury-Shepherd House features a Federal style entrance doorway with simple, semi-circular fanlight with interlacing tracery. The doorway is flanked by distinctive, detached sidelights that are also features of such early buildings as Gloucester, Springfield, and Richmond. These sidelights, which was filled with double-hung sash, may have come to the Mississippi Territory from Kentucky, where they can be found at Federal Hill ("My Old Kentucky Home") in Bardstown. This Kentucky attribution is further substantiated by the probability that John Hall, a Kentucky builder, built Springfield. Detached sidelights with moveable sash appear as late as c.1818 at Monmouth in Natchez. "Although the National Register nomination states that the Salisbury-Shepher House is the earliest documented residence in the state to possess 'detached columns with a recessed gallery,' architectural evidence indicates that the columns were a later addition to the house and probably replaced wooden chanfered posts, colonettes on pedestals (like the House on Ellicott's Hill), or slender turned posts. The façade of the Salisbury-Shepherd House is finished in horizontal tongue-and-groove boards, the common territorial treatment for the portion of a façade sheltered by a gallery or porch." This house was listed on the National Register on 16 June 1983, from a nomination prepared by MDAH architectural historian P. Ana Gordon. It is included in "Historic Architecture in Mississippi" (1973) (p. 51), "Old Homes of Mississippi, Volume I: Natchez and the South" (1977) (pp. 17-18), and "Lost Mansions of Mississippi, Volume II" (2010) (pp. 16-21). [HABS MS-60 (1936), as "Saulsberry"] |