John Johnstone called his plantation Annandale, as he claimed to be a descendant of the Johnstone family that held the title of Earl of Annandale and Hartfell.
Each day, tens of thousands of vehicles drive up and down Highway 463, also known as Mannsdale Road. Chances are, none of those drivers ever wondered what may have been in that verdant green area of Madison County before all the rooftops were built.
John Taylor Johnstone knew exactly what was there, and in 1820 he moved his family from Hillsborough, North Carolina, to find it. The farmland in the area was fertile and rich. Johnstone used his savings to purchase a number of farms – 2,600 acres in all- and he became wealthy by growing and harvesting cotton.
Johnstone and his wife brought their four children with them – two daughters (Frances Ann and Helen Scrymgeour Johnston) and two sons (Samuel and Noah Thompson Johnstone). Tragically, the two sons died in 1840, the very year the family moved to the Mannsdale area.
Johnstone called his plantation Annandale, as he claimed to be a descendant of the Johnstone family that held the title of Earl of Annandale and Hartfell. The first Johnstone home on Annandale Plantation was a large log house.
As Johnstone grew wealthier from the sale of his cotton crops, he was able to build a plantation house for his daughter, Frances, when she married William Britton in 1844. The home was completed in 1846 and named Ingleside. The magnificent home had a 180-foot-wide facade. Inside were eight bedrooms, dressing rooms, a parlor, library, dining room, breakfast room, and office.
When John Johnstone died in April 1848, Margaret Johnstone had a masonry Gothic-Revival-style church built on the property in memory of her late husband. That church was called Chapel of the Cross, located north of the site of the future Annandale mansion. After the church was completed, Margaret deeded the church and surrounding ten acres to the newly formed Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi. The chapel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
Margaret Johnstone’s next project was to build a new home for her and her unmarried daughter, Helen. Margaret hired New York City architect Jacob Lamour to design the Italianate structure based on a plan in Minard Lafever’s Architectural Instructor. Construction of the ambitious three-story, 40-room mansion was completed in 1859.
Folks came from all over the county to admire the majestic home with its soaring arched arcades that encircled the home. The elaborately furnished home featured a wide hallway for abundant shade and ventilation – necessary to survive the hot and humid Mississippi summers pre-air conditioning.
Margaret cared for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. After she died in 1880, the plantation was sold and remained unoccupied until it was destroyed by fire in 1924. The mansion was replaced with a Classical-style home.
The former plantation was long ago divided between two gated residential developments: Annandale Estates on the west and Reunion on the east, each with a golf club. Mannsdale Upper Elementary School also sits on former plantation land.
Folklore
What’s an old mansion without a ghost story? Annandale Plantation has two.
In a book by Kathryn Tucker Windham, the story of Annie Devlin is told. Devlin was a former governess for Helen. Devlin died at the Annandale mansion in June 1860 and was said to have haunted the home’s halls until the night it burned in 1924.
The other ghost story involves Helen Johnstone, who is said to weep at the grave of her fiancé, Henry Vick, in the graveyard behind Chapel of the Cross. The story goes that Vick died in a duel in New Orleans, his body sent back up the river packed in coffee beans to preserve it. He never married his love, and legend has it that even today, the smell of coffee wafts through the cemetery.
-- Article credit to Susan Marquez for the Magnolia Tribune --
