page_title: Windsor Ruins
section_title: Civil War era
hierarchical_section_title: Windsor Ruins / History / Civil War era
caption_attribution_description: English: Sketch of Windsor Mansion near Bruinsburg, Mississippi
context_page_description: Windsor Ruins are in Claiborne County, Mississippi, United States, about 10 miles southwest of Port Gibson near Alcorn State University. The ruins consist of 23 standing Corinthian columns of the largest antebellum Greek Revival mansion ever built in the state. The mansion stood from 1861 to 1890, when it was destroyed by fire. The 2.1-acre site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and was designated a Mississippi Landmark in 1985.
context_section_description: Once the American Civil War began in 1861, Confederate forces used the Windsor mansion cupola as an observation platform and signal station. In the spring of 1863, as part of his Vicksburg campaign, Ulysses S. Grant and 17,000 Union troops landed at the port of Bruinsburg and took control of Windsor mansion.  Following the Battle of Port Gibson, the mansion was used by Union troops as a hospital and as an observation station.  The Daniell family was allowed to live on the third floor of the mansion during the Union occupation.
  Windsor mansion survived the war and continued to be used by the Daniell family as a home and for social gatherings in the area.  During Reconstruction, the family derived income by leasing part of their vast land holdings.
  For more than 100 years, the outward appearance of Windsor mansion was a matter of conjecture.  But in the early 1990s, an 1863 sketch of Windsor mansion was discovered in the papers of a former Union officer, Henry Otis Dwight, of the 20th Ohio Infantry.  Historians believe that Henry Dwight made the sketch while his unit was encamped on the grounds of the mansion.
caption: Sketch of Windsor mansion (May 1, 1863)
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