The 166-acre seaside retreat that Jefferson Davis called home for the last twelve years of his life had been carved out of forest in the 1850s by Madison County cotton planter James Brown. Never a working plantation, the summer estate allowed Brown and his family to enjoy Gulf breezes. Slaves from Brown’s plantation reportedly constructed the buildings, sawing the cypress lumber at his small mill beside Back Bay. An 1857 map shows the property’s eight structures enclosed by a fence.
The sophisticated details of the Greek Revival main house suggest the hand of a master builder or architect, probably from New Orleans. The one-story frame dwelling stands on eight-foot-high brick piers, and its low hipped roof extends over a three-sided gallery. The house forms a U-shape, with the front, square core having a center-hall plan. Bedrooms occupy the two rear wings and have access to galleries via floor-length windows. The front gallery features paneled wooden columns, octagonal balusters, a dentiled entablature, and etched-glass doors. A German artist from New Orleans painted trompe l’oeil decoration in the hall and front parlors. Two small, square detached pavilions (destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and reconstructed) flank the front of the house.
In 1875, Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, came to the area searching for a quiet place to write his memoirs. Family friend Sarah Ann Dorsey, who had bought the Brown property in 1873 and renamed it Beauvoir, offered him the east pavilion, installed a library, and enclosed the back porch as a servant’s bedroom. In 1877, Davis wrote to his daughter Winnie, “By night I hear the murmur of the sea rolling on to the beach, by day a short walk brings one to where the winds sigh through the pines, a sad yet soothing sound.”
Upon her death in 1879, Dorsey bequeathed Beauvoir to Davis, who with his wife, Varina, lived here and greeted visitors, mostly Confederate veterans, until his death in 1889. In 1902, Varina sold Beauvoir to the Mississippi Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, stipulating that the property be used as a home for aging veterans. Operating as Mississippi’s Confederate Veterans’ Home until 1953, when the last Confederate widow died, the complex grew to include frame barracks, a brick hospital, and a cemetery.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the property, destroying the hospital, the pavilions, and the house’s front gallery and part of its roof. Restored, the house reopened on the anniversary of Jefferson Davis’s birthday on June 3, 2008. Subsequently, the interior was restored and the pavilions reconstructed. Focusing on the Davis era, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, with assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, rebuilt the rear detached kitchen and the wooden fence and gate at the front.