Beauvoir after Katrina...better than ever--and I get the scoop on the beaches!

It's taken me almost the entire month, but today I finally got to spend the afternoon at Beauvoir, the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. This is what the grounds look like today (pardon the incoming fog!). For the details about history and plans for the presidential library now under construction click here.

The small cottage just behind Jefferson's statue is where he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.  Beauvoir is in the background. After Katrina the cottage and statue were...well, gone.  Beauvoir itself looked like this:

Damage was incredibly severe. The magnificent front porch was gone, holes in the roof...very scary.  But what you don't see is that of the 60 pilings holding the house up, 30 had been washed away.

It's 5 1/2 years later, and look at the porch now.  The cottage you see to the west is identical to the one to the east which served as Jefferson's study. This fellow was on the 1:30 tour with me--here on business from Alabama and decided to check it out.

Both cottages are reproductions rather than restorations--Katrina didn't leave much.



It's hard to grasp the scale of Beauvoir without actually ambling up the steps and sinking into a rocker. Interior ceiling heights are 14 1/2 feet. The feel is much like some of the restored Imperial Palaces in Russia--especially the Czar's Summer Palace outside of St.Petersburg, though smaller, of course.

A portrait of Jefferson sits over the mantel in the front parlor. What looks like woodgrain on the doors is clever painting.The fabric on the chairs had to be re-made at a cost of over $500 a yard.  But experts made sure it matched the original and also that the interior wall colors and designs were authentic.

Like many southern homes, ceilings were high to diffuse the heat and windows were huge to allow breezes in. Many homes had through-and-through floor plans, which allowed the air to circulate--and we are noticing that this is still true of many southern homes. so different from our New England homes designed to trap the the heat.

I love the Live Oaks on the lawn.  They seem to make it through most anything and give the landscape a genteel antebellum feel.

Just as I was leaving, the fog decided to get serious--a bit unusual for a warm afternoon.



One interesting thing I learned about the beautiful beaches here--on the tour I noticed a sketch of Beauvoir from the late 1800's and you could see that it sat many, many feet above the water line--and the water line seemed scruffy and uneven.  We had always known the beaches here are man-made, but our guide enlightened me more.  Back in 1951 (after a bout of severe hurricanes in the '40's) Mississippi decided to dredge 15,000,000 cubic feet (or thereabouts) of sand from a trench 1500' out into Mississippi Sound.

Hence, the beaches.  But they are lovely, lovely, lovely. I intend to learn more about how they are maintained.