Charles McLaran House, Greek Revival plantation house in Columbus, Mississippi
The Charles McLaran House is a square brick mansion of 2-1/2 stories with a raised basement and a low hipped roof topped by a large square cupola. Its east and west facades are each five bays wide, with the central three bays fronted by two-story Greek temple porticos on paneled square pillars. The west side faces the Tombigbee River.
Built in 1847 for Charles McLaran, an Alabama native and one of the county's largest landowners, the house is attributed to Vermont-born architect James Lull, who arrived in Columbus in 1837. McLaran lived there only until 1856, when he moved to St. Louis, Missouri. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 2001.
Details in one of the parlors are direct copies from plates in Minard Lafever's 1835 pattern book The Beauties of Modern Architecture, so the room shows how a published design reached a Mississippi house. The house is also known as Riverview and as Burris House, names tied to its position facing the Tombigbee River and to later owners.
The house stands at 512 Second Street South in Columbus, on a parcel of about one acre, a reduced part of a lot that once filled the block between First and Second Streets South and Fifth and Sixth Avenues South. Only one outbuilding of the original estate remains, and mature plantings survive on the grounds.
A spiral staircase inside leads upward to a cupola situated on the building's roof. From this elevated vantage point, visitors can see outward in all directions across the city and river landscape.
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