Free previewStop 6 of Garden District Walking Tour: Mansions and Lafayette Cemetery
The Last Guest on First Street
You're on First Street in the Garden District, in front of number 1134, the Payne-Strachan House. Look at the front: two stacked galleries, one porch on top of another, held up by columns. It's a classic double-gallery Greek Revival house, built for the heat, with every room open to the breeze. Somewhere behind those galleries, in December of 1889, a former president died. Not a president of the United States. The only president the Confederacy ever had.
His name was Jefferson Davis. By 1889 he was 81 and living quietly in Mississippi. That fall he set out to visit Brierfield, the cotton plantation he had built on his older brother Joseph's land. Before the war, Davis had owned as many as 113 enslaved people. Brierfield was their labor, and his fortune.
That's the opening. The rest plays at stop 6 of Garden District Walking Tour: Mansions and Lafayette Cemetery (3 min in all). Unlock the tour to hear it all, or try stop 1 free first.
