Longwood — Nutt's Folly and the War That Stopped a Dream

Longwood is the largest octagonal house in the United States, and the most famous unfinished building in the American South. Cotton planter Doctor Haller Nutt hired Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan to design the thirty-two-thousand-square-foot Byzantine-domed mansion in eighteen fifty-nine. Construction began in eighteen sixty with craftsmen brought down from the Northeast.

Then the Civil War broke out, and the Northern workmen dropped their tools where they stood and went home. Their tools are still there, the upper floors frozen mid-construction, sawdust still on the floors, scaffolding still in place after more than a hundred and sixty years. Nutt, a Union sympathizer, watched the war destroy his fortune. He died of pneumonia in eighteen sixty-four, having seen only the finished basement and ground floor of his dream. His descendants kept the shell of the building until nineteen sixty-eight, when the Pilgrimage Garden Club of Natchez purchased it. The tools remained. The unfinished floors remained. Natchez locals called it Nutt's Folly, but the real story is a war that halted an ambition in mid-swing.