Selma is a planter's cottage built around 1811 by Gerard Brandon, an Irish immigrant, and a well preserved example of how the Anglo-American settlers of the Natchez District took up the Creole building tradition of the lower Mississippi. The house is a story and a half on brick piers, under a single umbrella roof that covers the main rooms, the full-width front gallery and the rear loggia alike. Inside, a large central salle is flanked by chambres, with small cabinets behind them. Its National Register nomination notes that Mount Locust, farther up the Trace, has an identical plan on a smaller scale, and that travelers in 1807 found Natchez houses wooden, French in style and galleried, and likened the town to the smaller towns of the West Indies.
Brandon came to America from Ireland shortly before the Revolution, lived first in South Carolina and in 1786, under Spanish rule, bought 600 arpents, about 510 acres, that became Selma. Before cotton took hold he raised indigo, with vats along Muddy Fork Creek. His first house stood within about 100 yards of the Natchez Trace, which ran through the plantation. It burned around 1811, and he built the present house about half a mile south-southwest of it. His son Gerard Chittocque Brandon, born on the plantation in 1788, later served as governor of Mississippi. The elder Brandon died in 1823 and was buried in the family cemetery on the ridge east of the first house site, and the plantation stayed with his descendants until 1875.
The house is privately owned. It was listed on the National Register in 1989 together with 55 acres of its original grounds.
Getting there
31.6003, -91.2700
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