Visiting Windsor

State Road 552 (if my memory serves me, but you'd better check a map) is a 13 mile curving loop that arcs through the woods behind Port Gibson and touches several historic sites including Windsor, a Native American mound, a church, and a Civil War battle ground before passing by Alcorn State University and the Natchez Trace before dumping back in Hwy 61. Every note I found online said that getting to Windsor would be hard, that the roads there would be "primitive."  I was expecting to find the ubiquitous red dirt road and was wondering if my little PT Cruiser was going to be able to make the journey, even had a moment of yearning for the Evil Jeep.  When I turned through town, headed into the shady green of the rural deeps, I laughed to myself.  Those people must demand a great deal of their roads.  The ruins of Windsor are tucked away on a two-lane paved road that is in much better condition than the one I live on.

Windsor has fascinated me for years. I think most Mississippians grow up with it being a part of our state mythology.  If you don't know what it is, you can click here to learn more.  I've wanted to go ever since I first heard the story of the ruins sitting silently there in the woods, sentinels to the passing of the ages.  I don't remember exactly when I first heard the story, sometime in elementary school perhaps.  It always seemed too difficult to get to, too far away to go.  Certainly my desire to go there was reinforced when I became aware of the connection the ruins had to Welty.  She took photos there herself, and my favorite story by her, "Asphodel," is said to have been inspired at least in some part by the majestic crumbling columns standing in the wild woods there.  There is a photo of hers I love, the columns with her shadow on the ground in front of them, that is wonderful.  I wanted to get a duplication of that with my shadow, but I was there at the wrong time of day, and actually since there were storms rolling in, there were no shadows at all to be had.

The ruins are well-kept.  There is a single strand of wire around them with some very polite signs asking people to stay out because the ruins are unstable.  No ranger or watcher is there to run you off with a stick, and I was very tempted to cross the wire to get a couple of shots.  My ingrained Mississippi manners kept me out.  I thought to myself, "This is why this works here.  We're like this.  We don't cross that strand of wire."  I am not quite sure what that makes us, but I think mostly that's a good thing.  I like to think of it as polite.  I would not have hurt anything if I had gone in; certainly I would not have touched the structures with so much as a fingertip, but they asked me not to go in so I didn't.

The columns are crumbling but beautiful.  I think the ruins there may be the most lovely historic thing I've seen in the whole state.  I don't know why that should be true, but of all the homes I've been to, there is something about them and their stubborn endurance in the face of hurricane, fire, and exposure to the elements in their abandonment by man that is powerful and grand.  I do wonder how I would have felt if I had been driving out there to see another big house put up before the War and fading into that sort of genteel-poverty, chipping-paint, museum existence.  Would it still have had the same power to move?   I think, like many other things, perhaps, it has come to be what it is by the loss of what it was designed to be.

I shot about forty pictures at Windsor.  I took every angle I could get, changed lenses, took detail photos, ate every inch of those columns and capitals, replaced with caresses of my eyes what I could not touch with my hands.  And I did want to run my hands over that cracking plaster, feel those exposed bricks which I suppose were made somewhere on the grounds as was common for the day.  I did want to sit at the base of one of those columns and feel the strength of it, the age of it, like sitting at the base of a very old oak, stare up into its tiny abbreviated cast iron canopy.  Ultimately, as is always the case when I shoot that many pictures at any one place, I only kept about ten of the pictures since a lot of the shots were duplications or just things I wound up being less than pleased with.

Windsor was one of my "lifetime shooting list" locations, and even though my skill with the camera is not very great compared with some of the people I know, I feel so happy that I got to go there.  I can carry it around with me now, see that beautiful clearing open up in my mind anytime I like.  And the next time I see Mr. Don McInnis striding out of the underbrush to disrupt the retelling of that story and the taking of that blackberry cordial, I know exactly what the setting should look like.