A Claiborne County plantation home lost to fire in 1890 and shrouded in mystery has been carefully recreated and is on display in Vicksburg.

Paul Reihle of Brandon worked on and off for 10 years recreating a model of the Windsor House for his daughter Alana with the little information documented on the specific architecture of the house after the plans were lost when it burned.

The Windsor ruins still stand today.

“I think the thing that fascinates most people that come to visit, especially when they just come to see the ruins, the mystery is nobody knew what it looked like,” Reihle said.

The Windsor House, located near Lorman, west of Port Gibson, was built between 1859 and 1861 by slave labor and owner Smith Coffee Daniel II, Reihle said.

The home survived the Civil War by acting as a hospital but eventually succumbed to a fire in 1890, thought to have started on the third floor by a cigar thrown into some debris. Only the china, stairs, railing and most of the 45 foot columns survived, Reihle said.

Some of the stairs and railing were transported to Alcorn State University and are used at the chapel. Of the 29 brick and plaster columns around the home, 23 still stand to this day and welcome visitors as the Windsor Ruins. Reihle visited the ruins as a child and has been riveted with the home ever since.

Other than those columns the look to the mansion was a mystery for years because the house plans were destroyed in the fire. The only information available on the home was a floor plan drawn by memory from a former occupant of the home, Smith Coffee Daniell IV. However, in 1995 a sketch of the house drawn by a Union solider was found in Ohio, and it was given to the National Park Service.

“That was the only known sketch that people think to exist and from that sketch I built,” Reihle said.

The model is made mostly from wood with plaster columns and staircases and the railing made from metal. He said the model is not built to scale, but instead he built it around the 45 foot columns.

Windsor had a school, doctor’s office, dairy, commissary and two bathrooms, which was not common at the time. The house cost $175,000 to build in 1859, but Reihle is unsure how much money he has spent on his model.

“It was one of the largest Southern mansions and plantation homes ever built, not just in Mississippi, but in the South,” Reihle said.

He built a second less intricate model of the house specifically to burn. On the 126th anniversary of the the house fire, Feb. 17, he started a fire in a back room on the third floor of the model to recreate what happened. The fire was filmed and the footage will be used in a video that will play at the Old Depot Museum where the model is set up.

“It gives us some local history, and we’re interested in local history,” museum director Dave Benway said. “It gives the local people something to relate to.”

The Old Depot Museum, 1010 Levee St., is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Reihle has plans to create an heirloom for each of his four children and this is his second. He made a paddle wheeler for his first daughter and is starting to think of ideas for his next two children including the possibility of Machu Picchu in Peru or the pyramids.

“So they’ll have something to remember their dad,” Reihle said.