Living with antiques: THE GILMOUR-CHRISTOVICH HOUSE IN NEW ORLEANS

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2001 by William Nathaniel Banks

In 1853, when Anna (Fig. 4) and Thomas C. Gilmour built their stylish house on Prytania Street in New Orleans (Pl. I), "prosperity flushed the city," according to the Louisiana historian Grace King. [1] She wrote that

The very stones of the streets seemed to cry out wealth and prosperity, and higher and higher figures end the statistical columns...more imports, more exports, more trade, more cotton. [2]

Indeed, New Orleans had become the principal port for the vast cotton trade of the South, and Gilmour, a cotton merchant, had accumulated a tidy fortune in association with Anna's father, Godfrey Barnsley (1805-1873).

Both Gilmour and Barnsley were English, and both retained their British citizenship. In 1824 Barnsley had come from Liverpool to Savannah, Georgia, and had prospered there as a cotton factor, buying cotton on consignment to fill orders for importers in Liverpool. On Christmas eve 1828 he married Julia Henrietta (1810-1845), a daughter of William Scarbrough (1776-1838), a wealthy landowner and shipping magnate. For more than a decade the Barnsleys lived in Scarbrough's splendid Regency style mansion. Designed in 1819 by the innovative English architect William Jay (c. 1792-1838), the house "represents the height of neo-classical town house design in America," according to the architectural historian Frederick Doveton Nichols. [3]

Perhaps in reaction to the emphatic classicism of his father-in-law's house, Barnsley chose the newly fashionable Italianate style for the grandiose manor house he planned to build for his family in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northwest Georgia. Charmed by the arcadian forests, meadows, and crystal springs, and persuaded that the upland air would be salubrious for his frail wife, in 1841 he began to buy land in what is now Bartow County, eventually acquiring 3,680 acres. Settling his wife and six children first in a crude log cabin and then in a larger frame house, he began work on his Italianate mansion. Although he made business trips to Savannah and England, and eventually to New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, he considered Woodlands, his Georgia estate, his permanent family seat.

When Julia Barnsley died in February 1845, Anna, their oldest child, took charge of the household and the care of her younger siblings, and she proved remarkably capable for a girl of sixteen. In December the children's tutor, William D. Burnham, wrote Barnsley that "Few young ladies, in my opinion, manage their household affairs with more judgment, temper, vigilance and economy." [4] The following August, Anna wrote her father, who was in Liverpool: "I know I am not handsome...[but] if my conduct & looks are those of a Lady's that is all that I want." [5] However, when Anna temporarily relinquished her duties at Woodlands to spend the winter of 1847 in Savannah, her uncle Joseph Scarbrough (d. 1850) proclaimed that she was "attending a party nearly every night...[and becoming] quite a belle." [6] Anna's giddy social whirl was short-lived. Aware of her father's displeasure, she returned to Woodlands in April.

Barnsley had established a brokerage firm in New Orleans, and by 1848 he was necessarily spending much of his time there. Early in 1849, with his younger children away at school, he took Anna to New Orleans with him. There she met her father's young colleague Thomas Gilmour, and after a brief courtship they were married on February 25, 1850. Barnsley had given his blessing; he was pleased that Gilmour's maternal grandfather was a first cousin of the duke of Argyll. [7] The newlyweds spent their first summer together at Woodlands, and Barnsley, visiting them there in July, seemed more jovial than at any time since the death of his wife.

In June 1852 Thomas Gilmour bought a lot on Prytania Street for $6,100, and the house, which had six rooms and a service ell, was finished in 1853 at a cost of $9,500. By contrast, Barnsley's twenty-six-room Woodlands, begun in the 1840s, was still unfinished at the outbreak of the Civil War. Nonetheless, despite obvious disparities, the affinity between the two houses is noteworthy.

Among the Barnsley papers in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia in Athens are a number of architectural drawings. [8] Two of them large, professionally rendered studies of facades, one in the classical style (Fig. 1) and the other in the Italianate style (Fig. 2). Also in the collection is the fragment of a drawing with the inscription "Front Elevation on Prytania Street... Isaac Thayer, Archt. and Builder...New Orleans, January 10th, 1853." Thayer was the New Orleans architect chosen by the Gilmours to design their house, and it was probably Thayer who executed the architectural studies illustrated here. [9] The rendering of a classical facade was presumably an early, rejected, proposal for either Barnsley's house in the country or Gilmour's in New Orleans, for Gilmour's contract with Thayer initially specified a house with a classical portico. [10] The Italianate rendering is a preliminary study for Barnsley's house. Also in the library's collection is a large study o f a facade--a line drawing more schematic than the other two--that depicts precisely the house that Barnsley built (Fig. 3).