[1] The House on Ellicott Hill is a National Historic Landmark and important as a grand and rare surviving example of an early vernacular building form once typical of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

The Anglo House on Ellicott Hill relates to its French vernacular contemporaries in Louisiana in the use of bousillage, composed of mud and Spanish moss, in the exterior walls of the frame upper story.

Eliza Baker in an 1805 letter home to New Jersey describes Natchez as having a number of houses that are similar in form, if not in scale, to the House on Ellicott Hill: ...the style which prevails... namely one-story, with this difference—that there is a lower story dug out of the side of the hill presenting two stories in front and but one in the rear...[with] a long gallery or piazza, partly enclosed by Venetian blinds... Buildings that were similar in form to the House on Ellicott Hill probably inspired English travel writer Fortescue Cuming, in Sketches of a Tour to the Western County, 1807–1809, to write that he was “much struck with the similarity of Natchez to many of the smaller West Indian towns, particularly St. Johns Antigua…the houses all with balconies and pizzas.” He was not the only writer to relate the early architectural character of Natchez to the West Indies.

Construction probably began after January 1798, when the site hosted an encampment of soldiers led by Major Isaac Guion, commander of the United States forces ordered to take possession of the Spanish posts east of the Mississippi.

In addition, the hill was the site of the encampment of Andrew Ellicott, sent by President George Washington to survey the boundary of the new Mississippi Territory with Spain.

The house retains most of its original millwork, including the fan-lighted doorways of the front and rear elevations, which are arguably the earliest Mississippi expression of this common hallmark of the federal style.