Antebellum Architecture

Antebellum architecture, its name drawn from the Latin for before the war, is the neoclassical building style associated with the southern United States, especially the Deep South, in the roughly thirty years between the 1830s and the start of the American Civil War in 1861. It is best known through grand plantation houses built in Georgian, Neoclassical and Greek Revival forms, often with tall columned porticos suited to a hot, subtropical climate, and it grew out of British colonial building traditions reinforced by European immigration following the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Beyond plantation houses, the style was also used for government buildings, churches and other substantial residences of the period.