In 1817, Natchez postmaster and businessman, John Hankinson, along with his wife, Francis McCrea, purchased a fifteen-acre tract of land on the outskirts of Natchez, intending to build there a residence for his family.  It was a lovely rural site located but a short carriage ride from town and the Mississippi River, and he envisioned a house set on the top of a small hill.  He quickly added another fifteen acres, and within a year the house, which he called Monmouth, was constructed.  He took the name from his former home in Monmouth County, New Jersey. 

      Life was promising for the Hankinson household in those early years.  In addition to being the Natchez postmaster, Hankinson practiced law and was a partner with Samuel Postlethwaite in a steamboat enterprise, organized in 1815.   

      Hankinson built Monmouth in a design fashionable for the era known as the Federal style.  Many grand houses locally and nationally reflected this style, which was popular from around 1790 to 1835. The original two-story mansion was built from wood and brick, with wood shingle covering on the roof. The interior layout included a wide central hallway.  This allowed for maximum advantage of breezes during the often stifling summer months.  Both upstairs and downstairs featured four rooms off the central hallway. A basement completed the efficiency of the home. 

      Hankinson, with the help of a head gardener and seven to twenty enslaved workers, cultivated the grounds and gardens, planting fruit trees and foliage over the next several years.  This landscape undoubtedly included a vegetable garden along with flowering plants as well as small garden plots cultivated for their own use by the enslaved families.    

      In the fall of 1821, the Hankinsons celebrated the wedding of their eldest daughter Margaret to Thomas Nixon, a young Natchez attorney with the firm of Knox and Nixon. That same year also witnessed the onset of financial difficulties for the family when Hankinson borrowed heavily using Monmouth as collateral.  Several years later, with the loan in default, Hankinson lost Monmouth.  The newspaper listing the house for sale described it as “a handsome new brick dwelling house, with all necessary outhouses, cistern and large garden, all under good fence.” Calvin and Priscilla Smith purchased Monmouth in 1825 at public auction for $11,000.00.  The following year they sold Monmouth to John A. Quitman, a recently arrived lawyer from Ohio. 

      John Hankinson never lived to see the sale.  Natchez folklore has Hankinson and wife Francis rescuing an ailing traveler, found near Monmouth, with all three succumbing to yellow fever.  In fact, while it is true that a 31-year-old William Farrington Codwise fell ill and died at Monmouth during a yellow fever epidemic, John Hankinson died in 1826 of Mania a potu, brought on by excessive drinking. Francis lived another ten years, joining her husband and the lone traveler in the Monmouth cemetery. 

      John Anthony Quitman was Monmouth’s most prominent occupant.  Arriving in Natchez as a penniless newly minted lawyer, he soon married into one of the areas most prominent families and went on to a partnership in the town’s most successful law firm.  During his life he served as governor of the state and in the Mississippi state legislature and the U.S. Congress.  He also gained national attention as a conquering general and military hero in the nation’s war with Mexico.  In the decade prior to the Civil War, Quitman, an ardent state’s rights advocate, was known as Mississippi’s “Father of Secession.”  

       By the 1850s, Quitman was one of the larger slaveholders in Mississippi, part of a Natchez aristocracy often referred to as “nabobs” because of the wealthy lifestyles and political power of its members.  He and his wife, Eliza Turner, owned over 400 enslaved people divided between Monmouth and four plantations located in Louisiana and Mississippi.  At Monmouth, anywhere from twenty to thirty enslaved people lived and labored there in the decades before the Civil War.  Many of these people worked in the main house as nannies, wet nurses, butlers, maids, and cooks, tending to the stream of chores needed to maintain a grand house in the style befitting the status of an elite slaveholder and powerful state figure.  Additional slaves on the property tended the expansive grounds as field hands, gardeners, and carriage drivers. 

      Quitman purchased Monmouth and its surrounding thirty-one acres for $12,000 in March of 1826.  Several years earlier, he had married Eliza, the daughter of the Mississippi Supreme Court judge, Edward Turner, perhaps the most powerful and successful lawyer in the state.  By the time Quitman had purchased Monmouth, Eliza was expecting their first child, Louisa.  

      Eliza Turner, as the mistress of Monmouth, oversaw the operation of the home estate and its many occupants for thirty-three years, often on her own when her husband was off doing politics or fighting wars.  As a politician’s wife, she fulfilled the obligatory duties necessary to advance the career of her husband, participating (reluctantly) when needed in the less refined milieu (compared to Natchez) of Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital.  As a mother, she bore eleven children, and she witnessed and probably assisted in the births of the children of her enslaved hands.  She ministered to the sick of both white and black families at Monmouth and endured the profound grief associated with the death of five of her own children.

 
       She also was there in a supervisory role during the significant alterations made to Monmouth over the years.  In the early 1850s, the Quitmans changed the front look of Monmouth from a Federal style facade with brick walls to a heavy Greek Revival style with stuccoed walls, scored to look like stone.  When that was finished, they began construction on the east, or left wing.  This was attached to the house by a rear gallery, which ran roughly parallel to the outside and detached kitchen building, giving Monmouth a square U shape when viewed from the rear.  The upper level of the new building provided extra bedrooms for the family and guests, while Quitman’s library occupied most of its lower level. The Quitmans later changed some of the first floor mantelpieces to white and beige-veined black marble. 

      Behind the mansion, a series of outer buildings, or dependencies, were erected.  A single-story, two-room brick building (originally with only a dirt floor) located behind the main house served as a coach house and kitchen.  Detached kitchens were common on such estates because they shielded the main house from food odors and reduced the possibility of the main house catching fire.  It was during the 1850s renovation that the Quitman’s added a second story to the building as sleeping quarters for the enslaved staff, plus a solid floor to the kitchen.  

      Monmouth’s extensive landscape evolved from simple vegetable and flower gardens during Hankinson’s ownership to a more vibrant and sculptured environment during the Quitman years. And again, Eliza Turner was solely responsible much of the time for its upkeep and bounty.  A typical exchange between Eliza Quitman and her husband is reflected in the following note she penned to him while he was away from home:  

“Spring is just opening upon us, the red bud is out and yellow Jasmine.  My flower gardens are all in order for the flowers to bloom well and show to advantage.  Do not suppose that I neglect the vegetables.  I have Irish potatoes up and peas stuck, tomatoes and eggplants nearly a foot high, and cucumbers running [sic] all in hot beds.  I shall have an early and fine garden." [SHC Quitman papers, Subseries 1.1, Folder 48. Eliza Quitman to John Quitman, Monmouth, Feb. 19th, 1847.  Historic Natchez Foundation.] 

      John A. Quitman died at Monmouth on July 17, 1858, apparently a victim of what was then called the National Hotel disease—an ailment similar to Legionnaire’s Disease, which many American politicians contracted after staying or dining at the National Hotel in Washington, D.C.  Forty-nine year old Eliza, a widow with several underage children, and multiple Monmouth household obligations, assumed stewardship of four plantations and the hundreds of enslaved individuals.  This great responsibility, however, was short lived.  In 1859, Monmouth matriarch Eliza Turner Quitman died and was buried next to her husband at Monmouth. Quitman daughters would later move their parents to the city cemetery north of town.