My plan for today’s column was to put together a walking tour of a historic area on the north side of Main Street in Columbus. I have previously laid out about a one-hour walking tour through the architectural history of South Side and several people have ask about a similar tour on North Side. Friday afternoon I decided to take my dog, an English setter named Liza, and try and lay out a North Side walking tour.
I used the Trotter Convention Center parking lot on Second Avenue as a good starting point. From there, I went north up the hill along Fourth Street to Third Avenue. That way, the tour started at the circa 1843 Williams-Glass house (which is also known as the Haven) and turned east at the top of the hill between the ca. 1845 Taylor-Nash house and circa 1835 Wade-Colom House. This route would go on to Seventh Street passing Franklin square, circa 1835, and Franklin Academy. Turning north on Seventh Street, one would pass a number of historic homes including The Lee Home (1847), Camellia Place (1847), the Fort Home (1840), which was remodeled in the mid-1850s, and the Elias Fort Cottage (1830). Other houses along the way show how some early 1800s houses were altered and “modernized” around 1900.
The walk would turn east on to Sixth Avenue, although just a long block down Seventh Street is Rosewood Manor (1835) and Lee Crest (1841). A block down Sixth Avenue, one comes to what I consider to be one of the most historic and interesting city blocks in Mississippi. Houses on the north side of the street include Beckrome, the Meador Home, and the Harris-Kilby-Wade Home. On the south side of the street are Wisteria Place and Temple Heights. Here, it is not the age of the houses that is most interesting but the stories that they tell.
Dr. William Spillman, a true 19th Century Renaissance man, lived at Beckrome. A.B. Meek, an attorney and poet, resided at Wisteria Place. Joshua Meador, the Oscar-winning long time head of animation effects for Disney Studios, grew up at the Meador House. Temple Heights is an architectural gem with surviving servants’ quarters. It was constructed by the interesting Brownrigg family. Across the street corner is the Harris-Kilby-Wade House. Clyde Kilby, who retired to the home, was friend and biographer of C.S. Lewis and an editor for J.R.R. Tolkien.
However, my plans for the focus of today’s column changed when I realized that three of the houses I planned the walking tour around, three of the most historically significant houses in Columbus, are for sale. The Williams-Glass House, Beckrome and Wisteria Place are all on the market. Each of those houses represent an irreplaceable piece of Columbus history.
The Williams-Gass House, 315 Second Ave. N., is good example of the Carolina Low Country influence in raised cottages. It is a typical raised cottage, having a brick basement and a frame main floor. It is, though, with its broad low-gable roof, a Carolina Low Country style. Isaac and Thomas Williams built it around 1843. The Williamses were free men of color, who had moved to Columbus from South Carolina not long after 1840. Isaac was a carpenter/laborer and Thomas was a blacksmith. Their business prospered. It is an interesting statement about the Williams’ status that their house was located in what would have been a prime location in 1840s Columbus. They moved from Columbus in 1851 and eventually sold the house to Adam Glass, who added an east wing.
Wisteria Place was the last home of A.B. Meek. He spent much of his life in Alabama, where he made a name for himself as an attorney, judge, speaker of the House of Representatives, attorney general, assistant to the U.S. secretary of the treasury, editor of the Tuscaloosa and Mobile newspapers, historian, moving force behind the creation of Alabama’s public school system and a poet of national reputation. He moved to Columbus in 1863.
Meek wrote a poem, “Balaklava,” honoring the bravery of the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava in 1854. The poem won high praise, and was the first poem honoring the Light Brigade. It was said that Queen Victoria was so moved by it that she had copies printed to be distributed to the public. Not long after the publication of Meek’s poem in England, Alfred Lord Tennyson decided to write his now immortal poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Dr. William Spillman was the classic Victorian example of a Renaissance man. He and his family resided in his 1836 house now known as “Beckrome.” Spillman was a druggist, a physician and a Methodist minister. His scientific interest spanned a wide variety of subjects, and he was especially interested in archaeology, botany, paleontology and conchology. Spillman opened his own museum in Columbus and was a member of the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia.
Though not trained as a geologist or paleontologist, he provided previously unknown fossils to some of the fathers of American paleontology. Several original fossil type specimens in the Smithsonian were found by or named for him. By 1855, he was providing the Smithsonian with specimens of fish, reptiles and shells collected in Mississippi and he discovered the first dinosaur bones found in Mississippi.
The list of people Spillman was associated with reads like a who’s who of Nineteenth Century American Geology. His legacy survives in the mid-1800s publications of the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia, the Boston Society of Natural History and the Geological surveys of Alabama and Mississippi.
Three homes now on the market and each having a unique place, not just in Columbus history, but in American History.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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