Isaiah T. Montgomery, former slave, Mound Bayou’s founder, civil engineer, and the only African American representative at the state’s 1890 Constitutional Convention, replaced his nineteenth-century one-story frame house with this twenty-room brick-veneered building that included a garage. Two-stories on a fully raised basement, it ranked among the most imposing African American residences in the state at the time. The full-width wraparound porch with tapered piers on the principal floor is reached by a dogleg concrete staircase; its half landing was used as a speaker’s podium. Other features that indicate Montgomery’s public role include the separate entrance into a vault-like basement room that may have been used as a post office, and two bedrooms on the principal floor that probably were guest rooms. The WPA-produced Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State (1938) noted that white visitors to Mound Bayou could stay at the Montgomery House. In the 1940s, the building became the nurses’ home for Taborian Hospital (DR34). Now vacant, the house is still owned by the Knights and Daughters of Tabor.