At Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site in New Madrid, visitors can explore a grand Southern mansion while learning about the families who shaped the development of Missouri’s southeastern lowlands for a century and a half.

Photo courtesy of Brian Sirimaturos
The Hunter-Dawson Home in New Madrid reminds us that Missouri, a border state with many upper South affinities, also had ties with the deeper delta South. Featuring bald cypress lumber from nearby swamp forests, construction on this fifteen-room mansion was begun in 1859 by William Washington Hunter, a fifty-two-year-old successful Bootheel businessman. Although Hunter died before the house was completed, his widow, Amanda Watson Hunter, moved in with some of her seven children just before the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1876, the house passed to their daughter Ella Hunter and her husband of two years, William W. Dawson. It remained in the Dawson family until it passed to the city of New Madrid in 1966 and then to the state in 1967.
The frame house was built by the combined labor of Hunter’s slaves and hired craftsmen. It displays traces of many architectural traditions—most notable are Georgian, Greek Revival, and Italianate influences. Hunter also built the grain house and privy that remain on the twenty-acre site. Mrs. Hunter selected most of the furnishings in the spring of 1860, according to records in the family papers. Much of this furniture, which came from the Cincinnati firm of Mitchell and Rammelsberg, is still in the home.
The grounds feature many large trees, such as oaks, gums, elms, and pecans, many of which were present long before Hunter began construction of the house, though some have been lost as a result of severe wind and ice storms in recent years.

Photo courtesy of Michael Comer
Without knowing something about the people who lived there, historic houses seem little more than empty shells. The Hunter and Dawson family stories breathe life into the old mansion, for these were families intimately associated for more than a century and a half with virtually all aspects of the development of the southeastern lowlands of Missouri.
William Washington Hunter came to New Madrid in 1830 from Washington County, where his parents had settled six years earlier after leaving their native Virginia. He went to work in a fur-trading post and mercantile store owned by Robert Goah Watson, and he rose quickly as a merchant. His success was no doubt aided when he married the boss’s daughter, Amanda Jane, in 1836. Amanda’s father was born in Scotland but came to America to work for his uncle, who in 1805 sent him to New Madrid to operate his Indian trading post. The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 devastated the area, and most of the residents fled, never to return, but Robert and his wife stayed to rebuild their business. After Watson’s death in 1855, William Hunter and Amanda’s brother continued the business in partnership.
With his own brother, A. S. Hunter, William established a general mercantile store, the Crystal Palace, where the latest products off of steam boats could be purchased. He also entered into partnership with R. B. Turner for the trade of dry goods, produce, and furs from their steamboat on the Mississippi River. And along St. John’s Bayou, east of New Madrid, he operated Hunter Mill Farm, a steam-run sawmill and gristmill. This was where much of the cypress for his home was milled. William Hunter combined his business dealings with an interest in civic matters, and in 1855, he helped organize the Dunklin and Pemiscot Road Company, which constructed a plank road through the swamps to settlements farther south in the Bootheel. An acquaintance of the Austin family, probably from their Washington County years, Hunter had encouraged the early settlement of Texas, where he acquired land holdings. When he died in 1859, Hunter owned at least fifteen thousand acres in Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. He also owned thirty-two slaves, who were inherited by his widow and seven children in the division of his estate.

Photo courtesy of Missouri State Parks
After William died and Amanda and the children moved into the house, family tradition maintains that during the Civil War, Union forces under Maj. Gen. John Pope forced the Hunter family from its two-year-old home so that it might serve as a military headquarters, though there is no direct evidence. Control of the Mississippi River was key to both sides’ strategies during the war, and New Madrid and nearby Island No. 10 were scenes of battle during the conflict. Amanda’s son, William Colson Hunter, along with many other local men, including William Dawson’s father, joined the Confederate forces.
William Dawson married Amanda Hunter’s daughter Ella in the house on Christmas Eve in 1874. When they moved into it in 1876 after Amanda’s death, they brought another distinguished lineage into association with this storied mansion. Dawson’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Pierre Antoine Laforge, came to New Madrid in 1791 just after the community was founded in Spanish Louisiana; he served as an interpreter and, after the Louisiana Purchase, as civil commandant and judge of the court of common pleas. His grandfather on his father’s side, Dr. Robert Doyne Dawson, was a physician and lawyer who came to New Madrid from Maryland in 1800 to represent a client who had several Spanish land grants. He served in both the territorial and state legislatures and represented New Madrid at Missouri’s constitutional convention in 1820. With his wife’s brother, John H. Walker, he helped to assure that the Bootheel, where Walker grazed thousands of cattle, was included as part of Missouri.
William Dawson, educated at Christian Brothers College in St. Louis, followed in his grandfather’s footsteps by serving three terms in the Missouri General Assembly from 1878 to 1884, when he was elected to the US Congress for one term. Despite continuing agricultural interests, he served also in other civic capacities and, beginning in 1914, for three terms as circuit clerk of New Madrid County. He was succeeded in that office by his daughter, Lillian, whom he trained. His son, William Dawson Jr. was involved in agriculture all his life, but he also served for more than twenty years as cashier of Hunter’s Bank and in 1933 became owner of the New Madrid Oil Company. A bachelor until late in life, he lived with his mother in the house after his father’s death in 1929 and then was joined by his sister Lillian after their mother’s death in 1933. William died in 1956 without children, and Lillian passed in 1975.
As early as 1960, efforts had begun to interest the State Park Board in acquiring the house as a state historic site. Then in 1966, the city of New Madrid bought the decaying old home for $15,000, with many of Amanda Watson Hunter’s 1860 furnishings still intact, and donated it to the state a year later. City officials were undoubtedly encouraged by state park director Lee C. Fine, who had grown up just down the street from the stately old mansion and who was distantly related to the Hunter family. A bare-bones summation can scarcely suggest the manifold connections these remarkable families—and their equally remarkable home— had with the settlement and development of the Mississippi Lowlands from Spanish times to our own. More remains to be discovered through additional historical research. The Hunter-Dawson home, beautifully restored to the period of 1860 to 1880, reflects the success of the earlier generations and carries their tradition proudly into the future.
HUNTER-DAWSON STATE HISTORIC SITE • 312 DAWSON ROAD, NEW MADRID
Featured image courtesy of Michael Comer