Originally named Belfast, Stanton Hall is the most palatial of the extant Natchez houses and was built for cotton planter and commission merchant Frederick Stanton and wife, Hulda. Thomas Rose (1806–1861) relied heavily on designs in Minard Lafever’s 1835 Beauties of Modern Architecture but added fashionable Italianate details including a bay window that opens onto a side porch enlivened by arcaded cast iron. An April 1858 newspaper article reported the completion of “one of the most magnificent and princely residences of Natchez” and identified Charles Reynolds and James Brown as masons, Price and Polkinghorne as plasterers, John A. Saunders as foreman, and John Wells as ornamental painter.
Stanton Hall exhibits the form of the grand Natchez mansion with the rear colonnade expressed as an Italianate arcaded double-tiered gallery. The three-bay entrance portico features Tower of the Winds columns with cast-iron capitals copied from Lafever. The roof belvedere is Italianate with bracketed cornice and arched windows. Extending from the rear is an attached, three-story rear service wing, now about one-third of its original size, that housed a first-story pantry, kitchen, and interior privies with upper-story bathing room and quarters for enslaved servants.
The house’s floor plan is typical of Natchez mansions, with a triple parlor, a wide center-hall, and a staircase in a lateral side-hall between the library and dining room. Rare survivals are the original gasoliers and wall sconces attributed to Cornelius and Baker of Philadelphia. The house became Stanton College for Young Ladies in the late nineteenth century, and its name changed from Belfast to Stanton Hall. The Pilgrimage Garden Club purchased the house in 1938 and opens it daily.