In 1948, Leland Speed Sr. began developing low-lying land near the Pearl River used as a horse farm into the state’s most elite neighborhood. Speed, mayor of Jackson from 1945 to 1949, hired his friends, architects Frank Fort and Dudley C. White, to plan Eastover, using as a model the 1930s River Oaks garden suburb neighborhood in Houston. Offering large lots, many of them near water, to wealthy professionals and entrepreneurs, the development capitalized on Jackson’s explosive postwar growth, especially in the booming oil and gas industries.
Eastover Drive, the primary connection with Jackson’s street grid, winds from Meadowbrook Road to Ridgewood. Fort and White designed Eastover’s first three houses clustered near the Meadowbrook Road entrance in different expressions of Colonial Revival. Leland Speed’s house (1949; 4166 Eastover), with its two-story central section and one-story flanking wings, exemplifies a post-World War II interpretation of Southern Colonial in its symmetrical, side-gabled form and monumental Ionic porch. Across a deep lawn it faces the more ornate and formal Ed and Marion Cowan House (1951; 4165 Eastover), a red brick residence composed of a two-story block flanked by one-story wings, reportedly based on Marion Cowan’s ancestral home on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street. The house of Ed Cowan’s parents, Dallas and Gladys Cowan (1952; 4120 East-over) has a pedimented portico and walls of salmon-colored brick, manufactured in Charlottesville.