Jefferson Davis' Beauvoir estate gets post-Katrina restoration
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, June 15, 2008
BILOXI, Miss. – More than 150 years of history guide every brush stroke by Philip Ward and Linda Croxson as they dab thin lines of paint on walls and ceilings inside one of Mississippi's most famous landmarks.
Their canvas is Beauvoir, the retirement estate of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Their task is to restore painted murals that Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters nearly erased.
Mr. Ward and Ms. Croxson, a husband-and-wife team of painters, always keep a researcher's dossier within reach. Century-old photographs and color charts in the report show them how to painstakingly duplicate the murals as they were painted in 1856.
"It's like trying to copy somebody's handwriting," Mr. Ward said. "You can do it accurately once. What's hard is doing it the same way 10 or 15 times."
Applying a fresh but historically accurate coat of paint to the antebellum home is the final phase of a yearlong, $4 million renovation of Beauvoir, mostly paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The paint job won't be done for at least eight more months, but that didn't stop Beauvoir from celebrating its grand reopening June 3, the 200th anniversary of Davis' birth, when visitors were allowed inside the beachfront house for the first time since Katrina.
A popular tourist attraction before Katrina, Beauvoir was one of the few historic structures on Mississippi's Gulf Coast to survive the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane.
Storm surge ripped apart the front porch. Eight inches of water flooded the home's living quarters, leaving mold on the walls and peeling away some of the paint on the murals. All told, roughly 30 percent of the house was gone.
Other structures on the 52-acre property, including a guest cottage and gift shop, were a total loss. The storm also washed away about one-third of Beauvoir's artifacts, including some of Davis' manuscripts and about $250,000 worth of Confederate currency.
"If that storm had lasted another hour, I don't think we would have had anything left," said Richard Forte, Beauvoir's board chairman. "God was looking over this place."
Changes are subtle: Crushed limestone replaced oyster shells on the ground underneath the raised house because of expense. Mr. Ward and Ms. Croxson are painting over layers of oil paint and distemper with water-resistant acrylics. Workers installed stainless-steel braces and reinforcing rods to make Beauvoir more durable.
"The house now is probably 400 times stronger than it was before," Mr. Forte said.
Beauvoir was built in 1852 and purchased by Davis in 1879, 14 years after the end of the Civil War. After he died in New Orleans in 1889, his widow sold the property to the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It was a home for veterans and their widows until 1957.
Before Katrina, tens of thousands of people visited Beauvoir every year to learn about Davis, a West Point graduate who was a U.S. senator and secretary of war before becoming president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
The hurricane turned the house into more than just a memorial, said Bertram Hayes-Davis, a Beauvoir board member who is a great-great-grandson of Jefferson Davis.
"It's something that portrays the [coast's] recovery from the disaster," said Mr. Hayes-Davis, a 59-year-old banker from Dallas. "It's one of those icons that has risen back to be better than it was before Katrina."
Contact: 2244 Beach Blvd., Biloxi, Miss.; 228-388-4400; www.beauvoir.org. Open daily 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tours, $9.