Built for John and Mary McMurran, Melrose is the best preserved of Natchez’s great suburban villas. An 1848 newspaper article identified the masons of the exceptional all-stretcher brickwork as John Wallover and James C. Fox from Philadelphia. English immigrant architect Thomas K. Wharton visited Melrose in 1859 and described it in his diary “as surpassing all” and “looking for all the world like an English park.”
The Greek Revival house has the typical Natchez mansion form: a brick cube fronted by a three-bay giant-order portico and spanned at the rear by a similar colonnade. A balustraded roof deck above a short clerestory crowns the building. The scored stucco of the columns and sheltered exterior walls was painted to resemble stone. Inside, wide doorways between the drawing room, parlor, and library are framed with fluted Ionic columns supporting molded entablatures. A similar frame defines the entrance to the side stair hall but differs in having a transom with muntins forming X’s that echo the exterior transoms and sidelights. Climatic devices include a jib window in the library, a dining room punkah, and hinged clerestory windows.
Melrose’s exceptional integrity encompasses original furnishings, picturesque and formal gardens, and a full complement of original outbuildings, six of which define a rear courtyard. Two nearly identical two-story brick buildings face each other, each with inset double-tiered galleries and giant-order columns; these housed the kitchen and dairy with upper-story slave quarters. The other four include matching latticed cistern houses and a nearly matching brick smokehouse and privy. At a distance from the house are frame buildings: a carriage house, stable/barn, two clapboard slave houses, a slave privy, and a second smaller barn. Today, Melrose is the property of the National Park Service, which opens it daily.