Neal Auction Louisiana Purchase 2015

2 TEMPLE HEIGHTS The handsome Columbus, Mississippi townhouse, Temple Heights, was built by General Richard T. Brownrigg in 1837. Brownrigg had moved his family from Edenton, North Carolina to Mississippi a few years earlier and bought a 2,000 acre cotton plantation several miles outside of Columbus. The design of the house was inspired by Brownrigg’s wife’s family home in Edenton, Mulberry Hill. The Brownriggs sold Temple Heights in 1847. It would change hands several times over the next 120 years. In 1967 Dixie Butler and her late husband, Carl, bought the then dilapidated property. The Butlers, both educators recently out of graduate school, undertook to restore the house, doing much of the work themselves. Not long after moving in, the Butlers opened the home for a candlelight tour for Columbus Pilgrimage. In a recent interview in the Columbus Dispatch , Mrs. Butler described that tour: “You can’t imagine what it looked like that first year. Fortunately everything and everybody looked better by candlelight”. The Butlers’ restoration of Temple Heights would be a labor of love spanning decades, during which they were advised by consultants John Webster Keefe, H. Parrott Bacot, James Del Prince and V.A. Patterson. They chose to preserve the 1830s character of the house, furnishing it with objects appropriate to the Brownrigg years, many collected in Mississippi and Alabama. Temple Heights is a Mississippi Historic Landmark, and is recorded in the Historic Buildings Survey and the National Register of Historic Places. Recognized as leading preservationists in Mississippi, Carl and Dixie Butler were instrumental in the creation of the Columbus Decorative Arts and Preservation Forum. In his 2002 article on Temple Heights for The Magazine Antiques , H. Parrott Bacot writes of the Butlers: “Their work should be an inspiration to others of modest means, showing that a restoration project need not be the exclusive bailiwick of millionaires”. Ref. Bacot. H. Parrott. “Living with antiques: Temple Heights, Columbus, Mississippi”, The Magazine Antiques , July 2002, pp. 96-105; “The Last Pilgrimage”, The Columbus Dispatch , April 5, 2015.