Monday in Natchez

So a week ago, I was on my second full day of my Natchez tour of homes. We started the day's tour with Monmouth. Monmouth has been turned into a hotel and restaurant, so it only offers tours at 10 a.m.

Monmouth had Zuber paper in the entry hall...

Aside from it's beauty, another thing that I love about the Zuber murals is that he often depicted places that he had never actually been. So he just used his imagination. In one house (Rosalie, I think), the Zuber paper was of scenes from India. But Zuber had never been to India, and in his imagination, there were pyramids in India. Here in Monmouth's murals, Zuber painted scenes of America, but he had also never been here.

Boston Harbor complete with it's moss covered trees...

And Niagara Falls with sailboats bobbing around...

Obviously, two things you'd never really see!

Here is a Waterford Chandelier that was originally a gasolier...

After our tour of Monmouth, we drove by a couple of other homes that you can tour, but not on the days we were visiting. Linden...

Auburn...

Then we went for our tour of Dunleith...

It is also now a hotel...

More Zuber in the dining room...

In the dining room, they had not converted one of the lights, so it was still a gasolier. Boy, those don't put out much light!

After Dunleith, we took a lunch break at a little dive called The Malt Shop....

The next (and last) house was Longwood. Longwood is the largest octagonal house in America.

The mansion was designed in 1859 and begun in 1860.

It was being built by Philadelphia craftsmen, but when the Civil War began, they dropped their tools and hightailed it North. Thus, the house is only finished on the basement level.

They don't allow photos in the finished portion, but they do once you get upstairs in the unfinished portions...

These were some of the tools that the workers left when they fled. They also had original crates where things were shipped in for the house. Here are some of the other artifacts that are on display...

See that round thing with the sunken hole in the middle (to the left of the trunk)? That was the female bathtub. Women would apparently sit on the edge, while water was poured over them. See that actual tub to the right of the trunk? That is the man's tub. They got to take a "normal bath". Lisa and I were both pretty sure that we'd rather have the man's tub to the ladies tub.

If you watch "True Blood" on HBO, you probably recognize this house. I heard that it was filmed for the show and texted my friend Billy a photo of it and got this response, "That was Bill Compton's place after he became the king of Mississippi."

After our home tours ended, we decided to hit up the shops. We had heard and read lots about the shops. It was a fairly disappointing thing though. Not too many cute shops. We did stop in an antique shop where I found a nice selection of Old Paris Porcelain (all iphone pics though). I got really excited about taking home a piece...until I priced it.

I don't even know how much this piece cost...

This piece was $1200...

I thought I'd set my sights a little lower and so I priced that little bread plate you see resting on the other plates in the lower right side. Yeah, but it was $295!

The craziest thing is that we were in that shop for about 10 minutes. We went into silver rooms that had merchandise that made the Old Paris look cheap by comparison. The whole time we were in there, we didn't see one sales person. As time went on, Lisa and I became convinced we were about to walk in and find someone that had been knocked in the head and robbed. Finally, we decided to just get the heck out of there. Once we were pulling away, some lady came and stuck her head out the door. She was lucky it was us in there and not someone who would have loaded their purses and ran.

Then we decided to head across the bridge to Vidalia, Louisiana to take some photos of Natchez from across the river...

For Dinner, we went to Cotton Alley Cafe. The food was good, but I have never been inside a restaurant that I wanted to redecorate so badly! I mean, it was all I could think about!