Stop 7 Melrose Dairy Building

Melrose Dairy Building

HABS

Quick Facts

Location:

Natchez National Historical Park

Designation:

National Historic Landmark

Amenities

4 listed

Accessible Rooms, Benches/Seating, Cellular Signal, Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits

The dairy building held two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs. The first-floor functions included a laundry and a dairy.

Laundry days at Melrose were difficult for the slaves and filled with hard tasks. These were backbreaking jobs that involved dangerous materials. People had to heat water in iron pots in the large fireplace. Then they poured the hot water into large washtubs where they scrubbed clothes, bedsheets, and table linens for the estate. They used caustic lye soap for cleaning and acidic lemon juice for deep stains. They had to rinse each item and wring it out. Afterward, they hung it on a clothesline to dry. Then they repeated the entire process for the next batch. They heated small irons in the fireplace for ironing all the cotton and linen items.

Melrose had a small herd of dairy cows to provide fresh milk and butter for the estate. It was stored and processed in this building. The dairy room contains a series of built-in cement fixtures along one side. The lower part was closed behind wooden doors. It served as an early refrigerator holding blocks of ice to keep food cold. Water filled open troughs of the upper part where enslaved servants placed dairy products to cool that would be processed into butter and cheese. The water also served to keep ants out of the food.

The upstairs rooms housed enslaved household servants. They had to respond to the ringing of the series of bells across the back porch of the big house. William and Eliza Jones served as a valet and a maid to the McMurrans. They likely lived in one of these upstairs spaces. William traveled with the McMurrans to northern resorts such as Niagara Falls in the summers. He also went with them to Europe when they made their Grand Tour with their children in 1854. Estate slaves were not like plantation slaves whose lives were ordered by the cycle of planting and picking cotton. Slaves who worked in the McMurran household lived their lives according to the routines and whims of the masters.  

Alice Sims came with the Davises to Melrose in 1866, along with her family. She had previously been enslaved by the Davis family at their Vaucluse Plantation in Louisiana. The Sims lived upstairs in the dairy building.

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