This two-story L-front house is finished with stretcher-bond pressed brick from its owner’s Vicksburg brickyard. Its octagonal cupola, bracketed and paneled cornice, one-story bay with jigsawn balustrade, and one-story porch with slender paired chamfered posts and scrollwork frieze place it in the picturesque mode of Italianate. At the rear is a rare survivor, a contemporary stuccoed carriage house with a gabled wall dormer decorated with stickwork and a square ventilator on the clipped gable roof.
New Yorker Richard F. Beck (d. 1891) moved to Vicksburg in 1865 with his brothers William and John, all brick masons. According to Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi (1891), his brick factory was one of the state’s largest. He served three terms as mayor, was president of both the Vicksburg Building Association and the Builders and Trades Exchange, and owned three plantations.