
The area’s oldest structure is this house of Junius R. Ward, who purchased the land in 1829. Although from Kentucky, Ward built a typical Mississippi planter’s cottage, a one-and-a-half-story wooden house with a gallery inset under a broken-slope roof, a dormer, and a center-hall plan. Ward’s daughter, Matilda, married Johnson Erwin, whose family home was the nearby Mount Holly (1858) an opulent, brick Italianate villa, now a ruin after a June 2015 fire.