Mount Holly Mansion - After the Fire

Mount Holly, on the pleasant shore of Lake Washington, in Foote, Mississippi, is one of those impossibly grand mansions of which many examples were built in the 1800s in various parts of the Mississippi Delta. The 30-room Mount Holly was completed in 1856 of brick with 2-ft-thick walls. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. In the 1990s or early 2000s, it had been used as a bed-and-breakfast, but had sat empty for many years. As usual, ownership was unclear. And, as so often tragically happens to neglected buildings, the mansion suffered a disastrous fire on June 17, 2015. I have not yet read an account of who was responsible, but the forlorn walls sit upright in their misery.

I took these photographs in December of 2015. There was no sign of any restoration or activity at all. What happens next? For some pre-fire photographs, please see my April 2011 blog post and read the interesting comments. Preservation Mississippi had an excellent 2010 article on Mount Holly.

Photographs taken with Kodak BW400CN film in a Leica M2 rangefinder camera. The BW400CN is sharp and fine-grain, but does not have the look of traditional silver negative films. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i scanner using Silverfast software and resized the files with ACDSee Pro 2.5 software.