House on Ellicott's Hill

About this property

The House on Ellicott's Hill, also known as Connelly's Tavern, James Moore House, or Gilreath's Hill, is a historic house museum at 211 North Canal Street in Natchez, Mississippi. Built in 1798, it is the oldest surviving building in Natchez from its early territorial period. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974 and a Mississippi Landmark in 2001. The House on Ellicott Hill is a National Historic Landmark and important as a grand and rare surviving example of an early vernacular building form once typical of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Built between 1798 and 1801, the house is also one of the first buildings in the Mississippi Territory to exhibit the definitive characteristics of the Federal style. The house features a distinctive roof shape created by surrounding shed roofs attached high on a central gable. This Anglo-American roof shape differs from the French Louisiana vernacular, where shed roofs extend from a central hipped roof. The Anglo House on Ellicott Hill relates to its French vernacular contemporaries in Louisiana in the use of bousillage, composed of mud and Spanish moss, in the exterior walls of the frame upper story. Construction details also document the early expansion of the house to the north and south and the early enclosure of a rear loggia. Built into the side of a hill, the façade of the house is two-stories including a raised brick basement. On the rear elevation, where the basement is beneath ground level, the house reads as a single story. A dry moat across the rear provides light and ventilation for the basement rooms. ...the style which prevails... namely one-story, with this difference—that there is a lower story dug out of the side of the hill presenting two stories in front and but one in the rear...[with] a long gallery or piazza, partly enclosed by Venetian blinds... Buildings that were similar in form to the House on Ellicott Hill probably inspired English travel writer Fortescue Cuming, in Sketches of a Tour to the Western County, 1807–1809, to write that he was “much struck with the similarity of Natchez to many of the smaller West Indian towns, particularly St. Johns Antigua…the houses all with balconies and pizzas.” He was not the only writer to relate the early architectural character of Natchez to the West Indies. This similarity is understandable since Natchez and the West Indies shared the same mixture of national influences, similar climate, and common trade interests. The House on Ellicott Hill stands on property acquired as a Spanish grant in 1797 by Natchez merchant James Moore. Construction probably began after January 1798, when the site hosted an encampment of soldiers led by Major Isaac Guion, commander of the United States forces ordered to take possession of the Spanish posts east of the Mississippi. In addition, the hill was the site of the encampment of Andrew Ellicott, sent by President George Washington to survey the boundary of the new Mississippi Territory with Spain. According to Dr. William Morton ("Andrew Ellicott, Stargazer"), it was Ellicott who first raised the American flag from this hill, to which Spanish Governor Gayoso responded by aiming his fort's cannon in its direction. A notice in Green's Impartial Observer [Natchez], February 21, 1801, indicates that James Moore, by that date, is living on the property. An 1805 city tax roll documents the house as having a tax valuation of $8,000, second in value only to Texada, which was built ca. 1798, documented as the city's first brick house, and valued at $12,000.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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