Writer Eudora Welty and New Orleans surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin both discovered Windsor Ruins in the 1930s, a time when the mysterious columns were taking root in the minds of Mississippians as emblems of the Old South’s lost grandeur. The mansion that the columns had encircled survived the Civil War, when Union troops camped here, but it burned to the ground in 1890.
According to Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi (1891), Smith Coffee Daniell II hired Shroder and spent $140,000 on his plantation house but died a few weeks after it was completed. No photographs of the house are known to exist, and its appearance was speculative until 1991, when a sketch was discovered at the Ohio State Archives in the diary of Henry Otis Dwight of the Twentieth Ohio Infantry. Handwritten on the sketch was “May 1, 1863, Residence near Bruinsburg.” The artist depicted an eclectic two-and-a-half-story raised house that combined Greek, Gothic, and Italianate features. The sketch also showed the large octagonal cupola on the hipped roof that Confederates used as a watchtower. Round-arched floor-length windows provided access to the galleries on the main floors. The giant-order, nearly peripteral Corinthian colonnade wrapped around to embrace the two-story attached service wing at the rear. Archaeological evidence indicates that the house’s stucco finish was applied to a frame house.
Twenty-three of the original twenty-nine stuccoed and fluted brick columns survive, soaring thirty feet into the air and resting on stuccoed and paneled plinths that are ten feet high. Sections of the iron gallery railing survive on the second-story level, described by Welty in “Some Notes on River Country” (published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1944) as “almost seeming to float like lace.” The grand iron stair that once ascended to the raised gallery was moved after the fire to Oakland Chapel at Alcorn State University (ND80). The Mississippi Department of Archives and History has owned and maintained the ruins since 1974.