Bellevue: Benjamin Hill's Greek Temple on the Georgia Piedmont

LaGrange, Georgia, is a mill town and a college town, and tucked within it stands one of the finest examples of Greek Revival domestic architecture in the Deep South. Bellevue was built between eighteen fifty-three and eighteen fifty-five for Benjamin Harvey Hill, and its story is inseparable from the convulsions of Georgia politics across the next three decades.

The house was commissioned when Hill was an up-and-coming attorney and Georgia legislator. The design, attributed to an architect known to history only as Taylor, features six tall fluted Ionic columns rising two stories above a wide front portico, with a second-floor balcony wrapped by a turned balustrade. Inside, carved wood cornices and Italian marble mantles finished the statement. The whole structure sat at the center of a twelve-hundred-acre plantation.

Benjamin Hill became one of Georgia's most prominent politicians. He served in the Confederate Congress during the Civil War, where he was a passionate defender of states' rights and a critic of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's war measures, even as Davis was occasionally a guest at Bellevue itself. After the war Hill served in the U.S. House and Senate, representing a Southern Democratic establishment determined to resist Reconstruction.

The house is now owned by the LaGrange Woman's Club, which maintains it and offers tours. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark and is open for tours.

What you see from the road is essentially unchanged from the eighteen fifties: the six white columns, the two-story portico, the deep porch shade. It was built for permanence, and permanence is what it got.