National Register Listing

Brandon Hall

NE of Washington on U.S. 61, Washington, MS

Brandon Hall is perhaps the grandest of the extant antebellum plantation houses of Adams County, Mississippi, where most mansions were built as townhouses or suburban villas for Natchez planters whose plantations were across the Mississippi River in Louisiana or upriver in the Mississippi Delta. The house gains further significance as the most outstanding frame mansion in the county and as the residence of the Brandon family, original members of the county cotton aristocracy.

Brandon Hall was built by Gerard Brandon and his wife, Charlotte Smith Brandon (Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi (Chicago: The Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1891], II, 817). Documentary (Ibid.) and stylistic evidence place the date of construction at 1856. The frame construction and vernacular use of Grecian motifs combine to make the house more typical of the mansions of neighboring Jefferson and Claiborne counties than of the brick mansions of Adams County. Gerard Brandon was the son of Gov, Gerard Chittoque Brandon, who was born in Adams County in 1788 and served as Mississippi's first native-born governor (1825-1832). The Brandons were among the leading families of Adams County, an area in which leadership changed little from 1788 to 1860. After the deaths of Gerard Brandon and his wife in the 1870s, the house became the residence of principally Aaron Stanton and his wife, Elizabeth, Gerard Brandon's daughter. (Aaron Stanton was the son of David Stanton, who added the ca. 1850 wing to the Elms, a National Register of Historic Places property.) The house remained in the possession of Brandon descendants until 1914, when it was lost because of a mortgage foreclosure (Adams Co., Miss., Deed Book 4E:118). In 1970, Brandon Hall was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Raymond St. Germaine, who have restored the house.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1980.