Cotesworth’s hilltop location reflects its historical significance. Purchased by up-and-coming attorney James Z. George in 1861, the nine-hundred-acre plantation remained his seat of power during his career from participation in the Secession Convention of 1861, as a colonel in the Confederate army, as chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court (1879–1881), and as U.S. senator (1881–1897). His career demonstrates the complexity of postwar Southern politics. He spearheaded the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, which disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites, but he was opposed to corporate interests, working as a senator on the Sherman Antitrust Act and introducing a bill to establish agricultural experiment stations.
George’s house combines elements of vernacular traditions and then-current fashions. It began in the 1840s as a two-story side-gabled house, one room deep with a center-hall, which he enlarged after 1861 with two rooms at the rear. He added a Greek Revival gallery on full-height boxed columns that shelters the tall windows and an iron balcony over the entrance door. A service wing and a one-story library separated by a breezeway came later. In 1887, George hired James Clark Harris to construct a second library, a picturesque octagonal building on the front lawn dominated by an oversized gable portico with a jigsawn lacelike screen. Since 2013, the house and its immediate acreage have been open to the public for lecture series, weddings, and other events.