Living with antiques: Temple Heights Columbus, Mississippi

Magazine Antiques, July, 2002 by H. Parrott Bacot

The story of the house known as Temple Heights provides in microcosm the history of the settlement of the region called the Old Southwest. Including roughly two-thirds of present-day northeastern Mississippi and northwestern Alabama, the area was home to the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes well into the nineteenth century. Limited settlement by white families began following the Chickasaw Treaty of 1816 whereby the Indians ceded a band of land on the east side of the Tombigbee River to the United States. The following year buildings began to be erected in what would become the center of Columbus, Mississippi, as the government began surveys for the construction of a military road between Nashville and New Orleans. (1)

Heavy settlement of northeastern Mississippi awaited two more treaties made with the reluctant Choctaws. By the terms of the Treaty of Doak's Stand, signed on October 18, 1820, the largest portion of the Choctaws' territory was transferred to the United States in exchange for land in the Arkansas Territory (2) The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, signed on September 27, 1830, transferred the remaining Indian land, but allowed the Choctaws three years to move. (3)

Significant settlement of Columbus, therefore, did not occur until the 1830s, when the rich alluvial prairie lands west of the Tombigbee River became available. The black soil that gives this section of Alabama and Mississippi the sobriquet "Black Belt" provided the right conditions for growing cotton, and, indeed, cotton was the foundation of Columbus's prosperity during the halcyon period from 1833 to 1861. The combination of the Civil War, the poverty of Reconstruction, and the boll weevil, which destroyed the cotton crops, had the fortuitous result of preserving the city's extraordinary inventory of nineteenth-century buildings. Only the older Mississippi River city of Natchez retains more historic structures.

The builder of Temple Heights, Richard Thomas Brownrigg, a well-to-do planter and businessman, was a native of the colonial tidewater city of Edenton, on North Carolina's Albemarle Sound. Like most of his fellow settlers, Brownrigg was seeking fresh land upon which to grow cotton. Accordingly in 1835, he bought two thousand acres between Columbus and Starkville. (4) The property had belonged to John Pitchlyn (c. 1750-1835), a Choctaw leader and interpreter, who was supposedly born in South Carolina.

According to their letters of late 1835 early 1836, Brownrigg's sister and brothers-in-law-Sarah Brownrigg Sparkman, William Sparkman (1783-before 1850), and R. T. Hoskins-had moved west before him. (5) They traveled to Columbus in a twenty-wagon train taking most of Brownrigg's household goods, farm equipment, and ninety-one slaves. Brownrigg and his wife, Mary Winifred Hoskins, stayed behind at Wingfleld plantation near Edenton until the birth of their daughter Sarah (1835-1905). (6)

The Brownrigg family must have scarcely been installed in the Pitchlyn plantation house before they began considering building a house in town. Brownrigg's business ventures required his frequent presence in Columbus, and Pitchlyn was located five miles away on a road that was generally muddy and difficult to traverse. Moreover, the desires of Mary Brownrigg may well have been a factor, for she had been raised in a fine house near Edenton and perhaps desired a modicum of that style of life. Brownrigg became a community leader in Columbus and a director of the Tombigbee Railroad and Banking Company a director and founder of the Columbus Female Institute (presently Mississippi University for Women), a city council member in 1840 and 1844, and the first senior warden of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church. (7)

Construction began on Temple Heights in 1837 on a high knoll, occupying a sizeable part of block twenty-eight, north of Main Street and on the corner of Ninth Street North and Sixth Avenue North. Clearly influenced by the tidewater North Carolina houses the Brownriggs had known, the house was of the side passage plan commonly seen in Edenton and New Bern. In some features it specifically recalls Mulberry Hill (also known as the Blount House), near Edenton in Chowan County, (8) Mary Brownrigg's mother's family seat, where she had been born and raised. For example, the broad wainscoted side hall terminates in a staircase that rises to a landing and then turns ninety degrees in a manner similar to to that at Mulberry Hill. Originally, Temple Heights had a pedimented portico at the front door, on the north side facing Sixth Avenue North, and a second one for the door on the east side, facing Ninth Street North. Their location and surviving evidence of their original appearance suggest that they were of a type rar ely found beyond coastal North Carolina. (9)

In the 1830s, Mississippi was in a period of architectural transition from the older Federal style to the newer Greek revival. In large part, Temple Heights is a late Federal house, with delicate nine-over-nine sash windows on the principal floor and six-over-nine sashes on the upper floor. The doors of six-over-two vertical panels on the principal floor would have been quite out of fashion in the East Coast centers of style at the time. Modest Federal style mantels survive in the bedrooms on the second and third floors.