Overlooking an unpaved road eroded deep into the loess soil, this house still bears scars from one of the Civil War’s most important campaigns. In the nation’s largest amphibious operation before World War II, Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army crossed the Mississippi River, landed at Bruinsburg, and moved toward Port Gibson. On May 1, 1863, Union troops encountered Confederate pickets stationed at the Shaifer House, and the Battle of Port Gibson began.
In the 1870s, the house became a site of reconciliation for veterans, in a meeting led by William Duffner, who had marched past the house in 1863 with the Twenty-Fourth Indiana Volunteers, and the residence’s owner, former Confederate lieutenant Abram Keller Shaifer. By 1900, Union veterans reliving their war experiences visited Shaifer’s house regularly. The one-and-a-half-story planter’s cottage features a full-width gallery set beneath the broken slope of the side-gabled roof. The house has a “saddlebag” plan with two front rooms separated by the house’s single chimney and two cabinet rooms at the rear. Perpendicular to the house and separated by an open breezeway is a one-story galleried dependency that housed the kitchen and dining room. Photos of Shaifer and Duffner at the house indicate that the front gallery once wrapped to the rear ell; the porch was removed in a 1981–1982 renovation. Owned by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the house is open to the public.