Longwood: The Untimely Octagon (October/november 1985 | Volume: 36, Issue: 6)

Longwood: The Untimely Octagon

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Authors: Roger G. Kennedy

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October/november 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 6

An article that we published in August/September 1983 entitled “ The Age of the Octagon ” brought such a burst of letters from our readers that we ran a postscript in December of that year showing eight more of the appealing structures that our correspondents had called to our attention.

Now we have come across Roger G. Kennedy’s account, in his forthcoming book Architecture, Men, Women and Money in America 1600–1860 (Random House), of the largest nineteenth-century octagon ever conceived in America—“our grandest exercise in architectural geometry,” according to the author, who is the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Kennedy’s story is of the Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan (“a tiger”) and his Southern client Haller Nutt (frail but tough), who blithely set out on the eve of the Civil War to build the octagonal mansion named Longwood in Natchez, Mississippi. As the tide of war rose about him and his state seceded, Nutt persevered in his determination to have Northern builders finish his house with Northern materials. The story is given an added dimension by the fact that Nutt, like many of Mississippi’s planter class, remained fiercely pro-Union throughout the war.

 

Our first piece of written evidence of the relationship between Haller Nutt and the architect Samuel Sloan is a letter from the latter responding to a Christmas Eve inquiry from Nutt about the date when Sloan planned to come to Natchez to lay out the house. It was January 11,1860; Sloan said he planned to reach Natchez by the middle of the month. Once there, he departed again before February 3, when Nutt wrote him to apologize for his having been in bed all during Sloan’s visit and, even more apologetically, to introduce his strong-minded wife to their correspondence: “I find on conversation with Mrs. Nutt that some of the views are entirely different from what we had understood before and for fear of producing other difficulties I wanted to write you so you would not go too far.”

There were such matters as her iron safe in the bedroom; best put it in a closet. And the dumbwaiter in the dining room—most offensive; put it in the pantry. And, of course, “all agree” it was “objectionable” to put the kitchen in the basement. And, said Nutt wearily, “I am afraid there is other points not well agreed upon.” These were, presumably, practical matters, for he allowed that in regard to “architectural proportions and style … I feel sure that your taste is far better than Mrs. Nutt’s and my own.”

Nutt gave notice, then and there, that Sloan would have to contend not only with Julia Nutt but that he himself had no intention of being passive: “I feel great interest in the Building and do destroy much of the pleasure attending it if I did not agree on the general arrangements.”

That was on February 3. Nutt wrote again on the eighth with more suggestions, though he admitted being