Barton Hall: Forty Thousand Acres and an Unfinished Staircase

In eighteen forty, a Tennessee transplant named Armstead Barton purchased forty thousand acres of Colbert County land near the Natchez Trace's northern reaches and began building a house to match his ambition. The result was one of the finest Greek Revival mansions in Alabama, its entrance sheltered by deep Doric columns, its interior dominated by a double spiral staircase considered among the most impressive in any antebellum Southern home.

Barton died in eighteen forty-seven before the house was finished. His widow supervised its completion over the following two years. The estate changed hands and became known as the Cunningham Plantation. The National Park Service designated Barton Hall a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-three. It sits near Cherokee, Alabama, where the Trace crosses into the Tennessee Valley, a monument to the wealth and ambition that cotton country produced in the years before the war.