01/24/2026
1850s Weddings at Melrose
The Christmas decorations at Melrose have been removed, and visitors to the main house will now see arrangements of white flowers placed in vases throughout the mansion. They are meant to symbolize, on a modest level, the wedding of Mary Elizabeth McMurran and Farar B. Conner, which took place in the Melrose drawing room on January 24, 1856, 170 years ago today.
Mary Elizabeth, the daughter of John and Mary Louisa McMurran, was a young adolescent when her family moved into their newly constructed mansion on the outskirts of Natchez. Eight years later, on January 24, 1856, Mary Elizabeth married Farar B. Conner, a close neighbor from nearby Linden. This beautiful pink and ivory silk gown may be the only surviving testament to that happy occasion. Tradition holds that it was part of Mary Elizabeth’s trousseau, the clothing and linens that a bride assembles for her marriage, and she probably did wear this dress for her wedding ceremony. Tradition also asserts that the gown was created in Paris, and that is born out in the fine quality of its design and fabrication. The McMurrans made the Grand Tour of Europe with Mary Elizabeth and her brother John in the summer of 1854, and their daughter was probably measured for the gown at that time.
The details of Mary Elizabeth’s wedding were well documented in the writings of her Quitman cousins who lived just down the road at Monmouth. Louisa Quitman wrote to her absent father of how beautiful Melrose looked for the occasion and described the midnight supper in the Melrose dining room, where a pyramidal bride’s cake was flanked by confectionary swans, columns, dolphins, and sprays of water—all crafted from spun sugar.
“Fazee” Conner gave his mother’s beautiful gown to his cousin, Eliza Conner Martin. She is shown here wearing the gown in her Clovernook home on South Union Street and would have worn it during the early Natchez Spring Pilgrimage tours of the 1930s and 1940s. However, she did enlarge the waist of the dress from 17 to 19 inches.
Many years later, Mrs. Martin donated the dress to local preservationists, Dr. Thomas and Mrs. Joan Gandy. The dress was included in a 1987 exhibit about Natchez Spring Pilgrimage tours at the Old Capitol Museum of Mississippi History in Jackson, Mississippi. Mary Elizabeth’s antebellum silk gown was exhibited annually in the Melrose drawing room for a number of years, but it is now too fragile and remains in museum collections storage.
Here, in addition to pictures of the wedding dress, are images of what may be the wedding cake pans for the “pyramidal” wedding cake. Weddings in the 19th century often featured elaborate fruitcakes and the largest pan bears a watermark, suggesting it was used in a water bath—perfect for baking fruitcakes. These three octagonal-shaped cake pans were donated to the park in 1999 and are in museum storage.
In a letter written later that year on August 11, 1856, Mary Louisa McMurran wrote of the wedding of two enslaved people at Melrose. She said "A portion of the servants were here a few evenings since, to attend the wedding of Patrick & Mime. Viola was bridesmaid. They were married in our presence, behaved with perfect propriety, and they all seemed very merry and happy over their games and supper afterwards." Sadly, in contrast to the earlier ceremony, we do not have any more details for the wedding of Patrick and Mimi.
The flowers will remain until after Valentine's Day.
