Windsor Ruins

Twenty-three full columns and five partial ones stand in a field west of Port Gibson, the surviving frame of Windsor, the largest antebellum mansion ever built in Mississippi. Smith Coffee Daniell II, a cotton planter who had made a fortune by thirty, had it built between 1859 and 1861 on a plantation of 2,600 acres. Carpenters and masons from the North and finishing craftsmen from Europe worked on it, and so did enslaved African Americans. The columns are stuccoed brick, about 40 feet tall and crowned with iron capitals cast in St. Louis and shipped down the river to the landing at Bruinsburg. Daniell died on April 12, 1861, just weeks after the house was finished.

Bruinsburg matters beyond the mansion. In the spring of 1863 Ulysses S. Grant landed 17,000 Union troops there to begin the march on Vicksburg. The Confederates had used Windsor's cupola as a lookout, and after the Battle of Port Gibson Union troops used the house as a hospital and observation post. The mansion survived the war and burned on February 17, 1890, leaving the columns, iron balustrades and stairs.

The Daniell descendants, the Magruder family, held the site until 1974, when they gave 2.1 acres to the state. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Mississippi Landmark. The state archives department finished a stabilization project in 2023 and added a trail around the columns. There are no facilities and nothing is sold.