Stanton Hall
Stanton Hall, also known as Belfast, is an Antebellum Classical Revival mansion at 401 High Street in Natchez, Mississippi. Built in the 1850s, it is one of the most opulent antebellum mansions to survive in the southeastern United States. It is now operated as a historic house museum by the Pilgrimage Garden Club. The house was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974 and a Mississippi Landmark in 1995. Description. Stanton Hall occupies an entire city block north of downtown Natchez, bounded by High, Commerce, Monroe, and Pearl Streets. The property is ringed by wrought iron fencing with  elaborate gate posts. The house is a two-story brick structure, plastered and painted white. Its front entrance features a two-story Greek temple portico, with four fluted Corinthian columns supporting an entablature and gabled pediment. Spaces between the columns have decorative iron railings, repeated in a second-floor balcony railing set under the portico. The main roof is hipped, and truncated with a large cupola at the center. The interior is elaborately decorated, using materials such as imported Italian marble, and chandeliers made of glass and bronze. History. Stanton Hall was built during 1851–57 for Frederick Stanton, a cotton  broker, as a replica of his ancestral home in Ireland. Stanton named it "Belfast", but only lived in it a short time before he died. The house's scale and opulence made it a great financial burden on his heirs, but it survived the American Civil War, and in 1890 was made home to the Stanton College for Young Ladies. In 1940 it was acquired by the Pilgrimage Garden Club, which uses it as its headquarters and operates it as a museum and event venue. In popular culture. The mansion serves as a design for Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. The  house's insides have appeared in ABC's mini-series "North and South" as the Mains' mansion interiors. The house was also seen briefly in "Show Boat" (1951). In "", Joan Didion writes that Ben Toledano's wife suggested she visit Stanton Hall as well as the Asphodel Plantation, the Oakley Plantation and the Rosedown Plantation to understand the South better.