Jefferson Davis's Miss. home is rising again

BILOXI, Miss. -- The retirement home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, battered by Hurricane Katrina but still standing, is about to get a painstaking face lift.

Later this month, workers will embark on a yearlong $4 million project to repair and restore Beauvoir, the only national historic landmark that Katrina severely damaged on Mississippi's Gulf Coast.

The Biloxi home, built in 1852 and purchased by Davis in 1879, was hit by a 9 -foot wall of water when Katrina roared ashore. Beauvoir had survived 21 hurricanes before Katrina, but the Aug. 29, 2005, storm nearly destroyed the popular beachfront tourist attraction.

Katrina shredded Beauvoir's roof, front porch, chimneys, and pillars, and the storm flooded the elevated interior with about a foot of water. The hurricane also damaged a library, museum, and other structures on the 52-acre property and swept away about one third of Beauvoir's artifacts, including some of Davis's manuscripts and roughly $250,000 in Confederate currency.

The core of the home is largely intact, however.

"It would have been a tragic loss that could not have been replaced," said Beauvoir curator Richard Flowers, "but we're going to bring it back bigger and better than before."

Some of the scars on the antebellum home are manmade -- and deliberate.

George Fore, an architectural conservator, is studying the home's painted walls and ceilings by chipping away layers of paint on the damaged frescoes. He is digging through the work of previous restoration projects to examine the original paintings.

"The design became less and less like the original with each repainting," he said. It's Fore's job to help recreate what the paintings looked like during the decade that Davis lived there.

"Nothing was lost in total. Nothing totally disappeared," he said. "Given the force of the storm, we were pretty lucky."

Some of the home's storm-tossed remnants aren't gone for good. Workers will recycle piles of bricks, slate, and plaster that broke off the home and will use the material to rebuild the structure.

Flowers said slate for the roof will be imported from the same company in Wales that provided the original material for the home. The color might be slightly off, because the slate is drawn from a different part of the same mine.

"They are still mining that same slate," he said. "It's just unreal."

In addition to rebuilding the home, Beavoir's stewards hope to construct replicas of other Davis-era structures that no longer exist on the property, including a carpenter's shop, maids' quarters, and a foreman's house.

Beavoir averaged about 100,000 visitors annually before Katrina. In the storm's aftermath, the state's Department of Archives and History fielded hundreds of phone calls and e-mails from people concerned about the building's fate, said Ken P'Pool , a deputy state historic preservation officer.

"In many ways, it symbolizes the revitalization of the entire Gulf Coast," he said of the home's restoration. "There are an awful lot of people who know and recognize that building."

Beauvoir already has had two major restorations, in 1941 and 1978. This project will be funded by a combination of public and private dollars. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to pay for roughly 75 percent of the $4 million.

Flowers said government red tape has slowed down the pace of the project.

"Once they start actually taking hammers to nails and start the rebuilding," he said, "I will feel like we've finally turned the corner."