Historical markers and some official publications assert that Rosemont was built around 1810 as the boyhood home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, but other documentary and architectural evidence indicates the house was likely built for Davis’s sister, Lucinda Stamps, and her husband, William. Samuel and Jane Davis came to Wilkinson County from Kentucky in 1811, and in 1817 they bought the 164 acres the house occupies. They named their cotton plantation, Poplar Grove, which in the 1820s was worked by about eleven slaves. By 1847, the Stampses occupied this house, and the property was renamed Rosemont.
Stylistically, the house’s Federal/Greek Revival details appear original and support a late-1830s date. The house has the typical planter’s cottage floor plan: a center-hall flanked by two rooms on each side and full-width front and back galleries under a side-gabled roof. The central gable above the front gallery and its Palladian window add refinement, and in this and other respects, the house resembles Oakdale (Lower Woodville Road, 1.8 miles west of Woodville), documented to the late 1830s. The same unknown builder probably constructed both houses.
Jefferson Davis and his older brother, Joseph, established their own (now demolished) plantations in Warren County, but Davis regularly returned to this house, including after his release from Fort Monroe in 1867. In 1971, the house, deteriorating and with overgrown plantings, was acquired and restored by Percival Beacroft. The house is open to visitors to preserve the story of the place where Jefferson Davis said his “memories began.”