Holly
Springs, Mississippi was a town flush with prosperity, culture and opportunity
in the first half of the 19th Century.
Cotton was king.
The Chickasaw Cession opened vast Indian lands for settlement
and real estate speculators were among the first founders of the region.
Within twenty years of the establishment of Holly Springs as a crossroads for
traders and land agents, the log cabins of the early settlers were replaced
with quaint cottages, and as the wealth accumulated from cotton and commercial
ventures,
large brick mansions with Corinthian columns were built along the shaded avenues
of the town.
Churches and schools for moral and cultural enrichment were established.
Cotton bales filled the town square ready to be shipped on the new railroad
founded by Harvey Washington Walter, attorney and investor.The railroad made
him fabulously
rich, and his wealth required a new home distinctively different from those
of his neighbors across town.
He hired the city’s noted architect, Spires Boling, and released
him to create a grand design. The result stunned local residents with its
boldness
and
diversion from the norm of mansions built anywhere in the South.
The gracious Greek Revival pediment and tall fluted columns were flanked
with bold, castle-like Gothic towers standing guard at each end of the
house.
In light of the history the house experienced, it was a blueprint suited
for entertainment and living in lavish style but was also rugged enough
to weather
the harsh reality of Civil War, the occupation of Union General Ulysses
S. Grant’s
army and the scourge of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.
