Stand on Second Street and the Andrew Morris House sits a little above you. It is a five-bay planter’s cottage on seven-foot piers, built between 1851 and 1855 for John A. Ragan, one block off Front Street in what is now the Natchitoches National Historic Landmark District. In those years this was still a river port. Cotton came up Cane River; planters who worked the country kept a town house for court days, church, and the landing. Ragan’s lot ran all the way back to Fourth Street. Whoever drew the cottage left no name. Ragan sold it in 1855, the same season the paint dried.
The Tucker family came next and stayed until 1891. Town houses change hands. During the Second World War this one belonged to Bessie Henry Himel, who ran a flower shop out of a box tacked onto the front. The box came off in 1991 and the old five-bay face showed again. Himel died in 1963 and was laid in American Cemetery, a short walk up the same street. She left the cottage to the children of Carl and Eula Henry Jr. After the succession their parents opened the attic into living space, in 1964.
No one named Andrew Morris has ever lived here. The name was stitched later from the middle names of the innkeepers who made the cottage a bed and breakfast. The rooms inside still answer to Ragan, Tucker, and Henry, which is closer to the truth than the sign. People rent rooms here now. That is not why the house is listed on HauntedNatchitoches.com. It stands because a raised roof cottage was built on the bluff of Cane River, and because the people who have lived in it over the years, sold flowers from it, left impressions that are still echoing, and perhaps some have not quite left the halls they once walked.
Experience this residence respectfully from the sidewalk in daylight, or book an overnight stay at the bed and breakfast.