Moss Grove Plantation House Jonesville, Louisiana

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

Moss Grove Plantation House (c.1870) is a wood frame story-and-a-half residence set in an idyllic rural setting on Black River a few miles south of the small town of Jonesville. Most of the stylistic features are Greek Revival (a country interpretation), the only exceptions being two Italianate mantels. Despite alterations (at the rear and on the interior), Moss Grove easily retains sufficient integrity to convey its architectural identity.

Due to changes in the landscape, the house has an unusual relationship to the Black River and its levee. The front lawn now sweeps down to the river without an intervening road. Historically there was a one-lane dirt road in front. Some of its roadbed can be seen. A gravel road atop a levee leads from paved Louisiana Highway 124 to the rear of the house. The levee was built behind the house in the 1970s at the owner's request. Placing the levee closer to the river would have meant moving the house back on the property, and the owners did not wish to lose the original verdant landscape of their home.

Of the many mature trees on the property, the most impressive is easily a huge and ancient live oak in the front yard. Not far beyond the oak is a 20-something foot drop down to the Black River.

As is typical of the Greek Revival in rural Louisiana, the house takes the form of a gable end galleried cottage with a central hall plan with two back-to-back rooms on each side. The front rooms are eighteen by eighteen feet; the rear rooms, eighteen by sixteen. The facade is sheathed in flush boards while the side elevations are covered in board and batten. (One suspects the latter is an early but not original treatment.) The inset five-bay gallery has paneled wooden posts with molded capitals and matching pilasters. The paneling appears both on the main shaft and then again above the necking. The balustrade, formed of simple squared-off balusters, is mortised into the columns and facade. The facade features a symmetrical pattern of openings - a central entrance with two windows on each side.

What is unusual is the twelve foot width of the central entrance (matching the width of the central hall) and its paneled folding doors. This feature is repeated at the rear of the hall. When the doors are folded back on themselves, the effect, as built, was that of an open dogtrot. (The central hall is now subdivided, as explained below.) The front and rear entrances each have a multi-pane transom crowned by a Greek Revival pedimented frame. The same pedimented treatment accents the facade's six over nine windows (with their original shutters). Surviving original visible features on the interior include most of the floorplan (see below), pedimented window and door frames, two wooden Italianate mantels, most of the flooring, and flushboard sheathing on the walls and ceiling of the central hall and one wall each of the four rooms.

Moss Grove was renovated in the 1970s. Alterations made at that time include:

1) The conversion of the attic to livable space and the insertion of a staircase at roughly the middle of the central hall. The two-turn staircase, with a closet below, encompasses the width of the hall. Behind it, and accessed via a door, is the remainder of the hall. (The new doorway copies the home's pediment shaped surrounds.) The attic conversion also added two windows in each side gable.

2) Dropping all ceilings, except for the central hall, from their original 13 l /2 feet to about 12 feet and covering them with modern materials.

3) Covering most of the original flushboard walls in the four rooms with thin sheetrock.

4) The work spanning the rear elevation (an open porch on one side with details copied from the front gallery and a board and batten enclosed area). As part of this project, a window was converted to a door. Originally a gallery matching that on the front would have spanned the rear. According to oral tradition there was a rear ell at one time. The architectural evidence is inconclusive on this point.

5) The subdivision of one rear room to provide a bathroom for the front room. The remainder of the rear room is a kitchen.

Other changes include the loss of two mantels, the loss of the chimney tops, and the replacement of most of the battens on the southern facing side elevation. The shutters for the side elevations' six-over-six windows are on the property awaiting re-installation. The front gallery was recently restored (to arrest rot); perhaps five percent of the fabric is in-kind replacement (mainly some of the balusters). Work on one pilaster (at the top) is yet to be completed.

Assessment of Integrity

The most notable alteration is easily the insertion of a large staircase that divides the central hall. But this change notwithstanding, Moss Grove retains those features which establish its Greek Revival identity and importance within Catahoula Parish - its gallery with paneled columns and its pedimented door and window surrounds. The quite wide front and rear openings, with their original folding doors, are also important surviving character-defining features.

Date of Construction

The exact date of Moss Grove is open to interpretation. The house remains in the original family, and according to family tradition, it was built after the Civil War to replace an earlier house either destroyed or heavily damaged by Union gunboat bombardment. Because a circa 1870 date is plausible from the architectural evidence, that date is being used for the purposes of this submission. However, most of the details could just as easily be 1850s. But some suggest a later date: the Italianate mantels and the molding profiles on the folding doors.