Jefferson Davis’ Beauvoir Faces Long Recovery After Katrina

By Deborah Fitts

November 2005

BILOXI, Miss. — “We’ve had the modern-day equivalent of Sheridan come calling.”
Robert Murphree has the daunting job of leading the effort to restore Beauvoir, the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Fronting the Gulf of Mexico, the 1852 house was severely damaged by wind and water when Hurricane Katrina struck in late August. Several adjoining historic structures were entirely destroyed.

“There’s no debris,” he says. “It’s just gone.” It’s piled 8 feet high in the woods.

Murphree says he has little idea where the estimated $10 million will come from to get Beauvoir back in business. The tourist attraction drew as many as 100,000 visitors a year. Given the totality of the damage, when the doors will open again is anybody’s guess.

“It would warm your heart, the outpouring of help,” Murphree said. Cleanup has been ongoing throughout the 51-acre property. Beauvoir was known for its beautiful grounds and mature trees, but it “has just been devastated.” By presstime in early October Murphree said Mississippi National Guardsmen had been working seven days a week for three weeks cleaning up the debris, “and they’re not remotely done.” Some 20 men from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources also worked with their chainsaws.

“The outpouring of help from across the nation was the only bright spot,” says Murphree.

Besides the downed and damaged trees, building debris and scattered artifacts, “All our hedges are dead, all our fences are gone, our brick walks are torn up, and waves tore gashes in the yard. It’s just a picture of devastation.”
Murphree estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the 55,000 items in Beauvoir’s collections were lost, including Davis’s Mexican War saddle, the catafalque on which his coffin lay during the 1889 funeral in New Orleans, and his two carriages.

“That’s the thing that’s broken my heart,” said Murphree. “A lot of things in the Hospital Museum are gone. A lot of things on the first floor of the Presidential Library are gone. Yesterday Pat [Beauvoir director Patrick Hotard] said, ‘You won’t believe what I found.’ He’d found the utensils that Jefferson Davis used in his cell at Fort Monroe after the war.”

Murphree is a board member of Beauvoir, formally dubbed the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library. Davis’s widow Varina deeded the property in 1902 to the group that still owns it, the nonprofit Mississippi Division of the United Sons of Confederate Veterans Inc. Beauvoir served as a home for Confederate veterans and widows until the early 1950s.

The house itself, perched on 10-foot piers, still stands, although heavily damaged. Raging water tore off the porch galleries that ringed the front and sides of the house, 14 feet wide and 14 feet high. That caused the portion of the roof that overhung the porches to collapse and heavily damaged the front façade. Water swept inside.

The adjoining Library Cottage, dating from the 1850s, where Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, is “completely gone,” as is the Hayes Cottage, another historic structure, on the other side of the home. Near the Library Cottage, the Confederate Hospital building, built in 1924 and housing a gift shop and museum, is now “a massive pile of brick.”

A hundred yards back from Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library was built as a commanding, two-story structure in 1998. “The first story was completely destroyed,” said Murphree. “The water just cleared it out. It’s nothing but a slab.” The steel construction held up the second floor, however, which was spared.

He noted that a massive bronze statue of Jefferson Davis on the first floor remained. It appears “rather defiant,” he said.

A wooden building erected 25 years ago as a half-scale exhibit of a veterans’ dormitory and Hotard’s non-historical house were also destroyed.

Murphree also mourned damage to Oyster Bayou, a rare remaining example of the many swampy bayous that once drained into the Gulf but that have been lost to development. “It was an ecological treasure” with swamp plants and large oaks and pines resembling the coastline before the settlers. “We’d done a lot of work to restore the bayou to its natural state and put in nature walks,” Murphree said. “Now it’s full of debris.”

The Beauvoir board has set itself the immediate task of stabilizing the remaining buildings and cleaning up the property. Eventually they will turn to rebuilding Beauvoir and the Presidential Library.

“Our big problem now is we have no source of income,” Murphree said, noting that nearly half of Beauvoir’s $900,000 budget came from admissions and another 40 percent from gift-shop sales. “Like everybody down here we were woefully uninsured,” although Murphree said the organization carried all the insurance that was allowed.

The State of Mississippi’s Department of Archives & History has long supported Beauvoir with grants, but Murphree said the state is stretched thin now. U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, “has been a great friend.” Beauvoir had just received a $300,000 federal Save America’s Treasures grant, and Murphree said they would try to get more. “We had hoped to get something from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), but unfortunately it appears not.”

Beauvoir had weathered dozens of hurricanes, but Katrina was unlike any of the others. That it is still standing is testament to its sturdy construction, Murphree suggested, given the extent of damage everywhere else.

“Until you see the Gulf Coast you can’t imagine the scope of destruction,” he said. Where there had been densely built shopping malls and residential development, “for a long way inland there is nothing. It is stunning. You will ride for miles and all you will see is debris. Not ruined houses; just slabs.”

Murphree pointed to a sort of macabre “silver lining” in the wake of Katrina. Other historic properties along the coast were lost, leaving Beauvoir nearly without competition for tourism dollars. A press release seeking donations states that, as “one of the few remaining historical sites on the Coast,” Beauvoir “has become the heart of the cultural and historic rebuilding.”

Tax-deductible donations may be made to the Friends of Beauvoir at a new address for donations, P.O. Box 7, Meridian, MS 39302-0007. Murphree says, “100 percent of donations will go to rebuilding.” Everyone is donating time and expenses and there are no administrative costs.