Among the few surviving antebellum houses in Jackson, this was the semirural homestead of brick merchant James H. Boyd, who moved from Kentucky in the mid-1830s and later served several terms as mayor. He married Eliza Ellis in 1843, and they bought this property in 1853 to build a house for their family of six children. Boyd descendants occupied the house until 1960, when the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Mississippi purchased it as their state headquarters and opened it as a house museum. The one-story, clapboard house takes a planter’s cottage form, with the characteristic side-gabled roof, symmetrical facade, full undercut gallery, and center-hall plan. The elegant arches connecting the gallery’s square columns are probably a late-nineteenth-century update to the original Greek Revival detailing. Early maps show the property had a circular, brick milk house (restored), a detached kitchen, a carriage house, a barn, and a cistern house, evidence for which has appeared in archaeological investigations that offer a glimpse into nineteenth-century middle-class suburban life. The large garden’s oak trees gave the house its name.