The Colonel James Drane house, built between 1846 and 1848 and moved to French Camp in August 1981, is a two-story frontier I-house with an unusual first floor: its central hall is an open breezeway, or dogtrot, that could be shut off by large hinged doors front and back. The house's National Register nomination calls that marriage of the I-house and the regional dogtrot unusual, and ranks the interior woodwork among the best folk renderings of Federal decoration left in Mississippi. When it was listed, the downstairs rooms kept their original folk paint colors, and the sitting room mantel, carried on columns of elliptical section, is painted to look like red and blue stone.
Drane was born in Columbia County, Georgia, in 1808, settled in Choctaw County in 1836 and sat in the state house of representatives from 1839 to 1850 before moving to the state senate. From 1857 to 1865 he was president of the senate, an office the nomination compares to lieutenant governor. He was a leading contender for governor in 1857 and 1859, and withdrew from the 1859 race to be with his wife after learning she was terminally ill. He died in 1869.
The house first stood about six miles northeast of French Camp, near the community of New Haven. French Camp Academy acquired it in 1981 to save it from demolition, took off the porches and rear cabinet rooms to haul it, moved it to school land along the Natchez Trace Parkway on a site chosen to resemble the original setting, and rebuilt the porches. The restoration followed the Mississippi Department of Archives and History's analysis of the original fabric, and the house was listed on the National Register on July 21, 1983.
Getting there
33.2953, -89.4005
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