• the plantation chapel, pictured at the right, was constructed around 1837 by Natchez architect and builder James Hardie. It is one of Mississippi's architecturally finest, earliest, and most unique essays in the Gothic Style.

• the "wash house" is a two-story, brick outbuilding with belt course and quarter-round windows, and probably dates from the late eighteenth century. It is architecturally unique for the Natchez region.
  

• paired with the "wash house" is the "kitchen." The "kitchen," very similar to the "wash house," and facing it across an expansive lawn, is also a two-story, brick building. Both of these buildings possess oversized fireplaces on the bottom floor, with slave quarters on the floor above.
  
• the "carriage house," surmounted by a pigeon house, stands behind the kitchen. Today the carriage house and the kitchen are united by a low, sloping roof, as shown in the drawing at the right. In the drawing the carriage house is at the rear, the kitchen is at the front.

The main plantation residence house, destroyed by fire in the early 1960's, was probably constructed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century on a land grant from the English government to Richard Ellis, a pioneer Adams County settler. The two-story brick outbuilding with belt course and quarter-round windows was probably contemporary with the main residence.

All of the early buildings standing today were constructed during the period in which Richard Ellis's granddaughter, Anna, and her husband, Dr. William Newton Mercer, were in charge of Laurel Hill. Laurel Hill gains additional significance from its remarkable integrity of setting and from its long history of family ownership, possibly the longest continuous history of family ownership in the state of Mississippi.

Laurel Hill is today the property of Pierce Butler, the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Richard Ellis. Pierce's grandfather, also named Pierce Butler, published a book called The Unhurried Years (Baton rouge: Louisiana State University Press, l948) in which much is said about Laurel Hill, particularly about its early days when it was owned by Dr. Mercer.