Amazing stories mom. I love old architecture everywhere but Southern is close to home.
The Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed most paths from antebellum prosperity to today.
There are precious few Southern "dynasties" like in New England or Texas.
The Union troops seemed to have been given a lot of latitude in destruction particularly in Missississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Middle Tennessee....and the Shenandoah Valley of course.
My wife's great great grandad was one of Tennessee's largest landowners and married to WP Barksdale's sister and they lost it all...everything. They went back to hardscrabble.
Most of my kin were hardscrabble Mississippi piney woods. My maternal grandma had some gentry hueguenot kin around Columbus Miss....Majure family.
Mississippi is still relatively the same bloodlines it was at the time of the war with little new blood having come in over the years sans some Yankees after the war and whatnot so nearly everyone down there has a "history" of some sort that they know....like your's...maybe without something still standing. Nashville is way diluted now....at least 25% Yankee I'd guess.
In the end....it's still dust in the wind but I enjoy the continuity. With the advent of new easy technology to preserve and access records, it should be a breeze for folks 200 years from now to know everything about us as thier ancestors ...if they care....some folks give not one whit about such.
Regards and thanks for sharing.
Grandpa Long (whose son married Grandpa Dent's daughter Nan) got back from the war, the Yankees had burned his house and barns and stolen everything but one old blind mule. His foreman, Bas, had taken Grandpa Long's favorite saddle horse and hidden him in the swamp. They basically started over with nothing.
Both families did all right eventually, though. Grandpa Dent went back to banking after awhile, and Grandpa Long became a general merchant. They were reasonably prosperous middle class folks. We still own some of the land (at least my dad and his cousins do), but it's only used to grow kudzu on . . . :grin:
Mom's family on her mother's side were merchants from Charleston and were hit pretty hard by the aftermath of the war, but her father's side were all small tradesmen - shoemakers and plumbers and folks like that. People ALWAYS need shoes and plumbing, so they did all right too.