Merrehope: Too Beautiful to Burn

In February of eighteen sixty-four, General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered Meridian destroyed. For five days, Union troops pulled up rail lines, burned depots, and leveled virtually every structure in town. Of the homes inside the city limits, only six survived.

Merrehope was one of them. The land was deeded to Juriah Jackson in eighteen fifty-eight, and the house had grown into a twenty-six-room Victorian mansion by the time the war reached it. Confederate General Leonidas Polk had used it as his headquarters, and when Sherman's officers arrived they found the place so gracious that they sheltered there themselves rather than torch it.

The legend is that Sherman declared it too beautiful to burn. True or not, Merrehope still stands on Highland Circle, open for tours, one of the most intact antebellum homes in Mississippi.