Beauvoir

The house was built in the 1850s by a Mississippi planter and named Beauvoir, a French phrase meaning beautiful view, for its outlook over the Mississippi Sound. Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States and afterward a private citizen, came here in 1877 and made it his home for the last dozen years of his life, writing his lengthy memoir of the war on the grounds.

After Davis died in 1889, his widow Varina eventually sold the estate on the condition that it serve as a home for aging Confederate veterans and their families, and for decades it operated as just that. Today Beauvoir is preserved as a house museum. It presents the life of Davis and the era of the Civil War, a chapter Americans continue to reckon with, and it does so on the very ground where he spent his final years.

Beauvoir is a textbook Gulf Coast raised cottage, lifted a full story off the ground on brick piers to let storm surge and floodwater pass beneath, with a wide central hall and doors and windows lined up to pull a cross breeze through the rooms. Deep shaded porches wrap the front, and tall ceilings let the heat rise, all of it designed long before air conditioning to make a subtropical summer bearable.

That design was tested to its limits. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina drove a massive storm surge across this coast and gutted Beauvoir, destroying outbuildings and flooding the main house. The site was closed for years and rebuilt with painstaking care, salvaging original materials where possible. The Beauvoir you visit today is in large part a restoration, a monument to the coast's habit of losing its landmarks and building them back.

Some of the most striking things at Beauvoir are older than the house. Great live oaks, low and spreading, their limbs hung with Spanish moss, shade the grounds and have stood through generation after generation of storms. Live oaks are famously wind-resistant, and these survivors are as much a part of the coast's identity as the beaches.

The estate includes gardens, a small cemetery, and a memorial to Confederate soldiers, along with walking paths among the trees. Facing the water across Beach Boulevard, it offers the beautiful view its name promises, a broad flat horizon of sand, sound, and sky that has drawn people to this stretch of coast for centuries.

The Mississippi Sound in front of Beauvoir is a shallow, warm arm of the Gulf sheltered by a chain of barrier islands offshore. Brown pelicans glide low over the water, laughing gulls and terns work the shallows, and dolphins are often seen from the beach and the boats that run out to the islands. The man-made beach here is one of the longest in the country.

Spring and fall are the finest seasons on the coast, warm and breezy with easier humidity. Summer is hot, sticky, and the heart of hurricane season, which runs into the fall and shapes life all along this shore. Winter is mild and quiet, a pleasant time to walk the grounds under the oaks with the crowds gone.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.