I have a memory of being taken as a child to see the Windsor Ruins and I remember standing in the midst of the columns and wondering what the house looked like before it was destroyed. I also remembering being told that the fire that burned down the house was perhaps caused by someone tossing a cigarette into a wastebasket. I have no idea if the wastebasket story is true, but perhaps by the end of this post, we’ll have better idea of the truth.

The fact is, not matter what the truth is, when you stand in the middle of Windsor Ruins, you cannot help but feel the ghosts of history swirl around you. I suspect that when you stand in the ruins of a Scottish castle, the feeling would be very similar. The brain automatically tries to fill in the missing bits of the house but the proportions are immense and overwhelm the senses.

So, what is the story of the Windsor Ruins?

From Wikipedia:

Photo by Jim Albritton

Windsor Ruins are in Claiborne County in the U.S. state of Mississippi, about 10 miles (16 km) southwest of Port Gibson near Alcorn State University. The ruins consist of 23 standing Corinthian columns of the largest antebellum Greek Revival mansion ever built in the state. The mansion stood from 1861 to 1890, when it was destroyed by fire. The 2.1-acre (0.85 ha) site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and was designated a Mississippi Landmark in 1985.

Windsor mansion was located on a plantation that covered 2,600 acres (1,100 ha). The mansion was constructed between 1859 and 1861 for Smith Coffee Daniell II, who was born in Mississippi and had acquired great wealth as a cotton planter by age 30. In 1849, Smith Daniell married his cousin Catherine Freeland (1830–1903). The couple had six children, with three surviving to adulthood.

Windsor mansion was built facing the Mississippi River and was located about 4 mi (6.4 km) east of the river. Windsor mansion was constructed as a 3-story block, consisting of a ground floor basement, with living quarters on the second and third floors. The main block was 64 ft (20 m) on each side. A 3-story ell projected from the east side of the main block. The ell measured 59 ft (18 m) by 26.5 ft (8.1 m). Archeological examination suggests that outer walls were constructed of wood covered in stucco. When completed, the 17,000 sq ft (1,600 m2) mansion contained three hallways and 23 to 25 rooms, each with its own fireplace. A featured innovation for that time period was the inclusion of two interior bathrooms supplied with rainwater from a tank in the attic. In 1861, cost of construction was about $175,000 (equal to $4,593,426 today).

The ground floor basement contained a school room, doctor’s office, dairy, commissary, and storage rooms. The second floor had a hallway flanked by the master bedroom, a bathroom, two parlors, a study and a library. In the ell off the second floor was the dining room. Connected to the dining room by a dumbwaiter was the kitchen, located on the ground floor. The third floor contained an additional bath and eight more bedrooms. Eight chimneys extended from the slate-covered roof, and a domed cupola with glass walls was constructed above the attic, over the main block of the mansion.

On April 28, 1861, Smith Daniell died at age 34, just weeks after construction of the mansion was completed. Once the American Civil War began in 1861, Confederate forces used the Windsor mansion cupola as an observation platform and signal station. In the spring of 1863, as part of his Vicksburg campaign, Ulysses S. Grant and 17,000 Union troops landed at the port of Bruinsburg and took control of Windsor mansion. Following the Battle of Port Gibson, the mansion was used by Union troops as a hospital and as an observation station. The Daniell family was allowed to live on the third floor of the mansion during the Union occupation. Windsor mansion survived the war and continued to be used by the Daniell family as a home and for social gatherings in the area. During Reconstruction, the family derived income by leasing part of their vast land holdings.

On February 17, 1890, a fire started on the third floor when, according to tradition, a guest dropped ashes from a cigarette or cigar into construction debris left by carpenters who were making repairs. Windsor mansion was destroyed leaving only the columns, balustrades, cast iron stairways, and pieces of bone china.

When Catherine Daniell died in 1903, her daughter, Priscilla Daniell, inherited the mansion property. Priscilla married Joseph Magruder, and the mansion site remained in the Magruder family until 1974, when they donated 2.1 acres (0.85 ha), containing the mansion ruins, to the state of Mississippi. The historic site contains 23 standing columns and 5 partial columns; it is administered by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Through the years, three of the cast iron stairways, that survived the 1890 fire, disappeared from the site. The fourth stairway was moved to Alcorn State University and serves as the entrance to Oakland Memorial Chapel.

Eva Marie Saint as Nell Gaither, Monty Clift as John Shawnessy, and Liz Taylor as Susanna Drake the 1957 M-G-M movie, Raintree County. Image courtesy of Turner Entertainment Co., A Warner Bros. Entertainment Company

The Windsor Ruins have captured the imagination of millions of visitors over the past hundred years and one great description of one person’s visit can be found at Southern Lagniappe. Janie describes her time at the ruins in great detail with a good history and some great photos. I highly recommend you check out her review.

Hubert Creekmore, Eudora, and Eileen McGrath in 1954 enjoying a picnic on grounds of Windsor Ruins in Mississippi – Photo from The Eudora Welty Foundation

The Mississippi River Basin Model, located in the Buddy Butts Park near Clinton, Mississippi, was built as a large-scale hydraulic model of the entire Mississippi River basin and it covers an area of 200 acres. It took from 1943 to 1966 to build it and the experiment station was in operation from 1949 until 1973. The model is now overgrown, but it you can still visit the station from within the Buddy Butts Park.

In the early 1970’s when I was a child, I remember being taken on a school field trip to see the model, but it is a very vague memory and I’m not really sure I understood the full gravity and impact of the model. I remember concrete valleys with small boxes and bumps that I think were indications of obstructions and sand bars located in the real river. They let some water flow through the model in one area, but they didn’t fully load the model because the cost was too high.

From Wikipedia:

Large scale, localised flood control measures such as levees had been constructed since the early 1900s, especially in the decade after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and following the Flood Control Act 1936. From 1928 onwards, the Army Corps of Engineers built a huge number of locks, run-off channels and extended and raised existing levees, but these control measures only targeted single sites, and did not look at the entire river system.

There had already been extensive modelling of individual sections of the river at the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, including a 1060 ft long model of the 600 river miles from Helena, Arkansas to Donaldsonville, Louisiana, but in early 1937 it was clear that impact of control measures were not completely successful.

In 1941 Eugene Reybold proposed a large-scale hydraulic model which would allow the engineers to simulate weather, floods and evaluate the effect of flood control measures on the entire system. This would cover approximately 200 acres, include all existing and proposed control measures, and a network of streams nearly 8 miles in total length.

In her March, 2011 article “The Scale of Nature: Modeling the Mississippi River“, Kristi Dykema Cheramie points out that in 1928 Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1928 in response to the Mississippi River flood of 1927 which then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover called “the greatest peace-time calamity in the history of the country.” In the next decade, the Army Corps of Engineers built 29 dams and locks, hundreds of runoff channels, and over a thousand miles of new, higher levees. But the River was not an easy enemy to beat and in 1936 floods in the Northeast displaced hundreds of thousands of people, so in response public outcry, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1936 which treated flood control as a “national defense” and provided federal funding for levees, dams, reservoirs and dikes. Implementation of flood control was turned over to the Army Corp of Engineers.

As work began along the Mississippi River basin, it became clear to Major Eugene Reybold, a district engineer in Memphis, Tennessee, that there was really no way to keep up with the effects of all the changes being made or to test proposals so he came up with the idea of a large-scale hydraulic model that would enable engineers to observe the interactive effects of weather and proposed control measures over time and “develop plans for the coordination of flood-control problems throughout the Mississippi River Basin.” In 1943, the Army Corp of Engineers approved Reybold’s plan and the construction could begin.

The site selected was near Clinton, MS most likely because there was already a Waterways Experiment Station located in Vicksburg (sorely underfunded), but the amount of flat land needed was not available in the Vicksburg area. Heading due East from Vickburg, Clinton, MS had a large area of land available and it was ideally situated between Vicksburg and Jackson.

Once the land was selected, the next question was how would Reybold come up with enough manpower to build the massive model in the middle of World War II with most able bodied men off fighting the war and the rest of the work force in manufacturing plants producing ammo and weapons. Reybold negotiated for the transfer of German & Italian Prisoners of War that had been housed stateside to a new internment camp he would build and then he would use their labor to build the giant model.

According to Cheramie’s article:

The prisoners cleared the site of a million cubic yards of dirt and rough-graded the land to match the contours of the Mississippi River Basin. To ensure that topographic shifts would be apparent, the model was built using an exaggerated vertical scale of 1:100 and a much larger horizontal scale of 1:2000. While the existing topography offered a close approximation of the actual Mississippi Basin, some areas required significant earthmoving; the Appalachian Mountains were raised 20 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, the Rockies 50 feet. An existing stream running east-to-west provided the model’s water supply. The streambed was molded to take on the shape and form of the upper reaches of the Mississippi, and a complex system of pipes and pumps distributed water throughout the model; it was regulated by a large sump and control house sited near what would become Chicago, Illinois. To simulate flood events, Reybold needed to introduce large volumes of water over short periods of time, so he designed a collection basin and 500,000-gallon storage tower system at the model’s edge. Small outflow pipes at anticipated data collection points channeled excess water to 16 miles of storm drains.

[..]

On April 1, 1952, George Stutts, a Missouri River engineer, conducted his regular field surveys of the levees in Nebraska and reported that northwest Missouri was in “no immediate danger of flooding.” Only seven days later, a new survey indicated signs of imminent and severe floods. The mayors of Omaha and Council Bluffs contacted the Army Corps District Office to propose using the basin model to predict flood stages, and the model was called into active duty for the first time.

On April 18, as the Omaha World Herald rolled out the headline “Missouri River Near Crest Here; Anxious Eyes On Soggy Levees,” the basin model was halfway through 16 days of continuous 24-hour tests. Engineers issued prototype conditions to the newly installed instruments, generating simulations that forecasted likely events over the next month — crest stages, discharges, levee failure and more. As water poured through the Missouri River section of the model, the resulting data were relayed directly to aid workers in Omaha and Council Bluffs, who were able to respond with brigades of civilians and sandbags to points where levees needed to be raised only slightly; areas predicted to flood dramatically were evacuated. In total the Mississippi River Basin Model prevented an estimated $65 million in damages.

With this impressive victory against the river, Reybold’s project was vindicated. The model had allowed the Mississippi River Basin to become, for the purposes of study, an object, a manageable site. Here engineers, community leaders and civilians could gather to discuss the potential ramifications of particular flood control measures and forecast likely scenarios. Each gallon of water passing through the model was the equivalent of 1.5 million gallons per minute in the real river, meaning one day could be simulated in about five minutes. This allowed for a tremendous capacity to collect data, to use the model as an active tool for communication, and to distribute information about the river as a system. With mayors from cities up and down the river gathering in the observation tower to watch the Mississippi cycle through an entire flood season, it became possible to find edges, limits and centers, to see how and where the river might strike next. The model imbued the river with a reassuring degree of certainty. Policymakers began to adjust to a new scale of thinking.

Although it has fallen into disrepair and is very much overgrown with weeds and brush, the site can still be toured and you can see reminders of the care, work and effort that the Army Corp of Engineers put into the The Mississippi Basin Model in order to protect property and lives. Before the days of computer modeling, it was the only and best way to predict flood events along the Mississippi River Basin. It is a marvel of engineering and a life saver. It helped the Corps learn more and help more people than it had ever been able to do before.

View the model from Google Maps!