Ordained in 1859, French immigrant Jean Baptiste Mouton came to Mississippi to be a missionary priest and immediately applied himself to the task of building. He eventually erected churches in Meridian, Iuka, Macon, Corinth, and Yazoo City. Father Mouton began the Columbus church before the Civil War, but the construction industry became so disrupted that walls stood without floor or roof in the spring of 1866, and it was a another year before the stuccoed-brick building was enclosed. Its form has been compared to the Gothic Sainte-Chapelle (1248 consecrated) in Paris, which was being restored when Mouton left France. Another and more immediate source might have been St. Mary Basilica (ND26) in Natchez, where Mouton was living when that church’s interiors were being completed. Inside Annunciation Church, the ceiling’s wooden quadripartite vaults are suspended from the roof’s superstructure and are painted in a fashion similar to the ornament added at Sainte-Chapelle during its nineteenth-century restoration. At the rear of the nave, marbleized cast-iron columns support a balcony defined by pointed-arched panels and reached by a cast-iron spiral stair. Additions to the east of the church mimic its forms.