Living with antiques: THE GILMOUR-CHRISTOVICH HOUSE IN NEW ORLEANS.

In 1853, when Anna (Fig. 4) and Thomas C. Gilmour built their stylish house on Prytania Street in New Orleans (Pl. I), "prosperity flushed the city," according to the Louisiana historian Grace King. [1] She wrote that

The very stones of the streets seemed to cry out wealth and prosperity, and higher and higher figures end the statistical columns...more imports, more exports, more trade, more cotton. [2]

Indeed, New Orleans had become the principal port for the vast cotton trade of the South, and Gilmour, a cotton merchant, had accumulated a tidy fortune in association with Anna's father, Godfrey Barnsley (1805-1873).

Both Gilmour and Barnsley were English, and both retained their British citizenship. In 1824 Barnsley had come from Liverpool to Savannah, Georgia, and had prospered there as a cotton factor, buying cotton on consignment to fill orders for importers in Liverpool. On Christmas eve 1828 he married Julia Henrietta (1810-1845), a daughter of William Scarbrough (1776-1838), a wealthy landowner and shipping magnate. For more than a decade the Barnsleys lived in Scarbrough's splendid Regency style mansion. Designed in 1819 by the innovative English architect William Jay (c. 1792-1838), the house "represents the height of neo-classical town house design in America," according to the architectural historian Frederick Doveton Nichols. [3]

Perhaps in reaction to the emphatic classicism of his father-in-law's house, Barnsley chose the newly fashionable Italianate style for the grandiose manor house he planned to build for his family in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in northwest Georgia. Charmed by the arcadian forests, meadows, and crystal springs, and persuaded that the upland air would be salubrious for his frail wife, in 1841 he began to buy land in what is now Bartow County, eventually acquiring 3,680 acres. Settling his wife and six children first in a crude log cabin and then in a larger frame house, he began work on his Italianate mansion. Although he made business trips to Savannah and England, and eventually to New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, he considered Woodlands, his Georgia estate, his permanent family seat.

When Julia Barnsley died in February 1845, Anna, their oldest child, took charge of the household and the care of her younger siblings, and she proved remarkably capable for a girl of sixteen. In December the children's tutor, William D. Burnham, wrote Barnsley that "Few young ladies, in my opinion, manage their household affairs with more judgment, temper, vigilance and economy." [4] The following August, Anna wrote her father, who was in Liverpool: "I know I am not handsome...[but] if my conduct & looks are those of a Lady's that is all that I want." [5] However, when Anna temporarily relinquished her duties at Woodlands to spend the winter of 1847 in Savannah, her uncle Joseph Scarbrough (d. 1850) proclaimed that she was "attending a party nearly every night...[and becoming] quite a belle." [6] Anna's giddy social whirl was short-lived. Aware of her father's displeasure, she returned to Woodlands in April.

Barnsley had established a brokerage firm in New Orleans, and by 1848 he was necessarily spending much of his time there. Early in 1849, with his younger children away at school, he took Anna to New Orleans with him. There she met her father's young colleague Thomas Gilmour, and after a brief courtship they were married on February 25, 1850. Barnsley had given his blessing; he was pleased that Gilmour's maternal grandfather was a first cousin of the duke of Argyll. [7] The newlyweds spent their first summer together at Woodlands, and Barnsley, visiting them there in July, seemed more jovial than at any time since the death of his wife.