Kay Windham Turner spent half of her life sitting on the front steps of the Coker House, she said, and the other half on the back steps. She thinks the new ones are too narrow.

Why? Because one of her relatives used to sit on the old ones — but she wouldn’t fit on these!

Kay grew up in the historic home on the edge of the Champion Hill battleground about 3 miles out of Edwards on the Raymond Road, Mississippi 467 She lived there from the time she was born in 1946 until the family moved when she was 17. They didn’t go very far — just across the highway to a new house.

The Coker House, built about 1852, has just undergone exterior reconstruction by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. It is considered one of the most significant structures that endured the May 16, 1863, battle of Champion Hill during the Vicksburg campaign. A Confederate victory probably would have changed the outcome of the war.

The house has a wide center hall, used as a parlor, with two large bedrooms on each side. A separate dining room and kitchen were originally connected to the back porch by a set of steps and another porch. There were, also, the other usual outbuildings. In the 1900s, two bathrooms were added. The bathrooms have been torn away, and the dining/kitchen building has not been reconstructed.

Kay has always been aware of the history centered on the house — though probably not as interested as many people — for she grew up with history buffs frequently knocking on the door, “and they continue to knock on my door across the road.” Years ago, it was not unusual to find artifacts such as belt buckles, shells and bullets.

Mr. and Mrs. H.P. Coker were living there when Union Gen. A.J. Smith positioned a battery in front of the house on that fateful day in May in 1863, dueling relentlessly with Cowan’s Battery of Loring’s Confederates, who were dug in on Cotton Hill nearby. The house suffered from the guns of each side, and for years bullet holes in the siding and shattered timbers gave testimonial to the fierceness of the battle. Across the road, Gen. Lloyd Tilghman was killed by cannon fire from the direction of the Coker House. Today, a stone and fence mark the place of his death.

The property was originally owned by two brothers, both doctors, who had moved from North Carolina. Dr. Jesse Cotton remained in the community, and in 1849 Dr. John A. Cotton and some friends headed to California to the Gold Rush, but he died at Independence, Mo. His widow married Coker, and they built the new house on her plantation. The Cokers’ descendants owned the property until 1932 when Alfred and Stella Gervin from near Rosedale bought it, moving to Hinds County with their seven children. Their son Bubba Gervin and his wife, Hazel, lived there in later years along with their daughter Louise and her husband, Noble Windham, and children Kay and Alfred.

“We had a fabulous time in this house,” Kay remembers, for all the family came to visit on every occasion and on each holiday. Sometimes there were as many as 25 staying there, she said, adding, “I never slept in a bed on a holiday until I got married. The children all slept in pallets on the floor.”

Folks were always dropping in, and they might stay a day or a month. A few extra places were always set on the dining room table in case somebody dropped by — and usually somebody did.

The family had a cook, Irene, who prepared the meals on a wood-burning stove. The family called her Tootney, and Kay spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her, not learning to cook, but enjoying the food. Tootney, she said, was “about 5 feet in both directions.”

“We had just about every fowl and animal you could think of — in fact, half a dozen of each,” she said. In addition to the usual crops and a garden, her Aunt Hazel also raised goats and sold the milk.

You would think, Kay said, that if there is such a thing as a ghost, then the house would be haunted, but nothing out of the ordinary was ever noted. The family’s peacocks, however, who make a shrill, screaming noise, had some convinced that spirits roamed the grounds.

In 1962, when Kay’s grandmother died, the place was sold to Fred Adams Jr. of Jackson, who operated Adams Eggs Farm there, using one room for a time as his office. The company is now Cal-Maine Industries. From the time the Windhams moved out, no one has lived in the Coker House. Adams deeded it to the Jackson Civil War Roundtable in 1985, and they made plans to stabilize it to keep it from further deterioration, but little was accomplished. The organization deeded it to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and plans were begun for restoration — or reconstruction.

The house continued to deteriorate until last year when the MDAH, using grant money, had the building dismantled, the pieces numbered and stored, and on Dec. 8, 2008, the process of rebuilding began, using as much of the original material as possible.

“It’s beautiful,” Kay said. “It looks the same as the house I grew up in, but it’s not the same. The timbers are still good, the doors and mantels are mostly intact, but so much could have been avoided with just a little bit of effort — like putting on a new roof. I guess they’ll restore the inside when they get more grant money. I just hope it doesn’t take as long as it did to do the outside of the house.”

Though a road cuts through the edge of the lawn, many of the ancient trees — mostly magnolias and cedars still stand with camellias almost a century old. They bloom profusely, Kay said, like they are determined to hang on, part of our heritage.

From her vantage point across the way, Kay has watched with a deep personal interest the reconstruction of her childhood home.

Did they ask her advice?

“No,” she said. “If they had, I would have told them to make the steps wider.”

Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.