Columbus Pilgrimage: Our Start

Envoys of the Pioneer Club of Columbus ventured to Natchez, Mississippi to observe their highly successful event and take notes on how it all worked. The ladies returned home buzzing with ideas about Columbus’ own beautiful antebellum homes and their potential to attract tourists and bring tourism dollars to the cash strapped community. 

Columbus, like the rest of the nation, was still trying to extract itself from the Great Depression. The New Deal was winding down and money was tight for most families as a new recession gripped the South. The winds of war in Europe were also gaining strength. People wanted and needed a distraction. 

In 1939 it was announced that the Mississippi Federation of Music Clubs was hosting its annual convention in Columbus in April 1940. A ready-made influx of tourists would be in town. What better time than during their event to host a Spring Pilgrimage? A Columbus Pilgrimage Committee formed, and the first annual event was titled, The Pilgrimage of Wisteria Time in Columbus – quite the mouthful! 

The committee began collecting names of potential antebellum homes still in good enough shape to show. Many of the grand homes’ owners had fallen on hard times during The Great Depression but their “bones” were still good. Some of the grandest homes in town were in disrepair, others were divided into apartments so that families could hang onto their homes in hope that better days were ahead. But there were still enough homes that over 25 invitations were sent to an informational meeting of the owners of potential homes for the tour. The meeting was held in June of 1939 at the local YMCA.  

The first tour needed to be publicized far and wide to draw attention to the event. A special tour was organized in the fall of 1939 for the Associated Press Travel Writers. Among those journalists was Mississippi’s own Eudora Welty who had attended the women’s college in town (II&C now MUW) as a young woman. The travel writers captured the first descriptions of the homes and their articles appeared in papers from Memphis’ Commercial Appeal, Birmingham News, Knoxville Journal, Atlanta Constitution, St. Clair Chronicle, to the New York Times.

The descriptions the writers used were limited and dated because the only descriptions for older homes at the time was the language of colonial architecture. Architectural history of the South was virtually non-existent as the Society for Architectural Historians had not been founded yet. The descriptions of those first travel writers to Columbus were devoid of terms like Gothic, Greek Revival, and Italianate that would become synonymous with Southern architecture. They did quite accidentally get the late Federalist styling correct in their descriptions of the elements of the some of the earliest homes built in Columbus. 

The homes on the first Columbus Spring Pilgrimage included nine of the homes on our tour this year: Camellia Place, Wisteria Place (Meek Home), Baskerville Manor (Hamilton Hall), Snowdoun, Shadowlawn, Riverview, Colonnade, White Arches, and Waverly Mansion. Each of these homes is a residence opened by their owners to share their home’s magnificent architecture and history with the public. 

Other homes that were on that first tour are: Franklin Square, Rosewood Manor (Maydrew Manor), Leigh Crest, The Cedars, Temple Heights, Dawnview (torn down in the late 1950’s), Flynnwood (torn down), Homewood, The Old Homestead, 12 Gables, Pratt Thomas Home (Woodward House), Lehmquen, and White Hall. 

Join us April 2-13, 2024, to tour these homes and discover how critically important their restoration is to the history of Columbus. Tickets are available online and at the Columbus Visitor’s Bureau (117 3rd Street South) daily during the event.