Hunter-Dawson House: Antebellum Survival on the Mississippi

This fifteen-room mansion at the edge of New Madrid was built between eighteen fifty-nine and eighteen sixty for merchant and landowner William Washington Hunter, who had come to Missouri from Virginia three decades earlier. Hunter died of yellow fever in April of eighteen fifty-nine before the house was finished. His wife Amanda moved in with their seven children and lived here through the Civil War.

When Union forces besieged New Madrid in the spring of eighteen sixty-two, General John Pope used the Hunter house as his headquarters. The family survived the occupation and continued living in the house for nearly a century more. Amanda's youngest daughter married William Dawson on Christmas Eve, eighteen seventy-four, and the house passed down through the Dawson line until nineteen fifty-eight.

The city of New Madrid purchased it in nineteen sixty-six and donated it to Missouri as a state historic site. It is now preserved with its original Victorian furnishings.