League_Girl wrote:
It just looks like building. What is so special about it?
It was the grandest (and perhaps largest) house in the South. Of all the plantations destroyed in the South, it is considered the greatest loss. The scale of the house is hard to understand. If you look at the front porch landing where the front door is---that is 12 feet off the ground level. The ceilings inside were 15 feet tall. It had some of the most incredible plaster work of any house ever built in America. But yes, at the expense of slavery. And that was not a good thing. Although this plantation, Belle Grove, was lost to a fire and collapsed structural elements in the mid-20th Century, it is survived by its neighbor, Nottaway, as the second grandest plantation in the South.
At Belle Grove, try to imagine being a guest climbing the front steps to the entry porch and finding yourself 12 feet above the ground. Imagine the immense door opening revealing a grand hallway 15 feet wide and about 80 feet long before you laced with intricate Corinthian columns reaching upward 15 feet. Then, at the end of the hall, another grand hall with a gargantuan spiral staircase illuminated by a curved stain glass window throwing delicate rays of pastel light onto the soft plaster of Belle Grove's walls.
Belle Grove's style is a bit difficult to discern. In ways it looks the typical grand plantation of the South. But upon closer inspection, a sort of eclecticism makes itself known. Looking similar to a Greek Temple as a home to the gods, it also has elements depicting the much more modern Victorian age. It is not symmetrical as many plantation homes were, but rather an interesting balance of unsymmetrical wings.
All that remains of Belle Grove today is a marker showing where it once stood...and memories...and scaled working drawings done by the Historical Architectural Building Survey in the earlier part of the 20th Century...and a few pieces of woodwork and plaster saved from destruction and later incorporated into other buildings in a gesture of homage to this once grandest home of the South.
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"My journey has just begun."