Melrose Estate

Melrose was never a working plantation. John T. McMurran, a Pennsylvania-born lawyer, built it as a suburban estate in the 1840s, and the house was finished in 1848. He paid for it with cotton: he owned or held an interest in five plantations that used the labor of more than 350 enslaved people, and in 1833 his wife's parents had given the couple a 645-acre plantation and 24 enslaved people. Irish master masons laid the brick beside skilled enslaved laborers.

The people who lived and worked here are the reason the National Park Service runs the place. The 1860 census counted twenty-two enslaved people at Melrose. William and Eliza Jones served as the McMurrans' valet and maid, and William traveled with the family to Niagara Falls and, in 1854, on the family's Grand Tour of Europe. The laundry and dairy building still stands, and its upstairs rooms housed household servants who answered the bells on the back porch. After the war, Alice Sims, who had been enslaved by the Davis family at Vaucluse in Louisiana, came to Melrose with her family in 1866 and lived upstairs in that building.

The estate became a National Historic Landmark in 1974, and the Park Service acquired it in 1990. Walk the grounds and outbuildings first, then take the house tour.