Monday, January 1, 2018

'McRaven' the John H. Bobb House, Vicksburg, MS


The John H. Bobb House, Vicksburg, MS. 1849 (1797) Source: Wikimedia
This house has a complex building history. Originally built in 1797 as a small house, it was expanded in the 1820s and further finished in its present form in 1849 by John H. Bobb, a hybrid Greek Revival/Italianate affair, of the side entrance plan, typical with southern houses. The house was used as a field hospital during the Civil War and Bobb himself was shot in a dispute over flower picking in his front yard, all giving the house, currently open as a museum, the distinction of being haunted. The house has a simple typical Greek revival façade, with spare lintels over rectangular windows. It's the porch which really brings in the Italianate design (the porch façade type), with thin supports, pierced with jigsaw designs and lacy brackets supporting a large Greek Revival entablature pierced by Italianate paired s scroll brackets. Of particular note is the somewhat odd extra layer at the top of the cornice with dentils that almost look like Gothic crenellations. 

Source: Jeff Hart
Similar is this house, at Adams and Grove, probably built as a Greek Revival (1850s?), somewhat later, and furnished with a similar porch and bracketed entablature. Note here how the architect has eschewed the double columns for the porches, instead creating openwork struts with ironwork inset into them instead of jigsaw work that do not divide at the floor of the second story. Also, note how the entablature is less dependent on the Greek Revival, somewhat less classically correct here.

No comments:

Post a Comment