Greenwood LeFlore - Malmaison

Malmaison

Leflore wanted a manor house that befit his status as a wealthy planter. He commissioned James Harris, a Georgian, to design it. Leflore was an admirer of Napolean Bonaparte and Josephine, and had the house designed in French style. When he sought a name for the house, "he decided on the name of the chateau, ten miles west of Paris on the Seine." LeFlore called his Carroll County home Malmaison.

To furnish his mansion, LeFlore imported most of the furniture from France, where it had been made to order. Silver, glass, and china came in sets of dozens. The drawing room set was of 30 pieces of solid mahogany, finished in genuine gold and upholstered in silk damask. The house held mirrors, tables, large four-poster beds of rosewood with silken and satin canopies, and four tapestry curtains depicting the four palaces of Napoleon and Josephine: Versailles, Malmaison, Saint Cloud and Fontainebleau.

"Malmaison was one of the show places of Mississippi. It was a great tourist attraction and was visited annually by hundreds from all parts of the United States. Around it clung the memories of the transition of Mississippi from Indian territory to its present status."

LeFlore occupied the mansion until his death in 1865. He was buried wrapped in the American flag, on the estate. He left in addition to the mansion, an estate of 15,000 acres and 400 slaves. With emancipation after the war, the slaves became freedmen, but many may have stayed on the plantation to work for his descendants.

LeFlore descendants used the mansion until it was destroyed in a fire in 1942. Only a few pieces of crystal and silver, and some chairs were salvaged from the ruins of the mansion. The horse carriage used to transport LeFlore to visit Andrew Jackson and other Washington, D.C. officials had been saved and has been preserved.

Carson describes LeFlore:

"...he was first and foremost a man whose family had positioned him to draw together Choctaw and Anglo-American worlds. He owned slaves, read and wrote, and prayed at camp meetings, but he also presided over a political hierarchy of pipe lighters and captains, provided food, shelter, and educational opportunities for his followers, and promulgated his vision of the Choctaw future at the foot of the mound that had given his people life."