Named for owner Helen Johnstone, whose mother had overseen the construction of the Chapel of the Cross (JM10) in Madison County, the two-and-a-half-story wooden Colonial Revival house overlooks extensive farmlands from atop a ceremonial Indian mound. Johnstone married Episcopal priest George C. Harris in 1862, and in 1896 they retired to this plantation, The Helen Place. Reducing the approximately thirty-foot-high Indian mound to twenty feet, they built their house. After it burned in 1906, Stanton immediately constructed a concrete-block house; that too burned before being occupied. He then produced the current house, which resembles design number 203, Colonial Art, published in Barber and Kluttz’s Modern Dwellings (1899). Stanton expanded the design’s partial-width porch, added full-length windows to access the Ionic-columned porch from both front parlors, and reworked the interior to include the standard Mississippi center-hall. A Palladian window with Gothic tracery opens to the upper porch from Harris’s private chapel. A single-run wooden stair ascended from the bottom of the mound to the front entrance, while a drive led to the porte-cochere on the north side.
After Helen Harris’s death, the house passed into tenancy and by the 1970s was abandoned. In the 1990s new owner Drick Rodgers began an ongoing rehabilitation. The current two-over-two Italianate windows were installed in the belief that the house dated to the 1890s rather than to 1907. Several early-twentieth-century barns stand at the rear of the farm.