As a boy, Tate Taylor dreamed of living in an antebellum house. The actor/writer/director grew up in Mississippi but left home in 1996 to pursue his career, first in New York and then in Hollywood. But when he returned in 2010 to film The Help—the Oscar-winning movie based on the novel by his childhood friend Kathryn Stockett—the dream “came back with a vengeance.” A columned house used in the movie was for sale but Taylor took a pass because it had little land. “I wanted to be in the middle of nowhere,” he says. After a months-long search that led him through much of the Deep South, he circled back and found the perfect place in Church Hill, a tiny community just north of Natchez: Wyolah Plantation, a 100-acre spread with a three-story Greek Revival dwelling, constructed in 1836, and eight outbuildings.