After completing his carpentry apprenticeship in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Davenport moved to Savannah in 1809. He built several elegant homes in the Federal and Georgian styles. While most homes of the time were built of wood, Davenport used brick to emphasize his growing wealth and social status. After his death in 1827 from yellow fever, his wife converted the house into a boarding house. She would live in the residence until the Baynard family of Hilton Head purchased it 13 years later. Over the next decades, the house fell on hard times and became an abandoned rooming house. Even while in deep disrepair, the house was still recognized for its architectural significance by New Deal surveyors as part of the 1930s Survey of Historic Buildings in America.

When the mansion was threatened with demolition in the mid-1950s, a group of citizens concerned about preserving the city’s architectural heritage formed the Historic Savannah Foundation. Their first official act was to purchase the Davenport House, which served as their headquarters for several years. Starting with the ground floor in 1955, the foundation began the painstaking restoration work necessary to return the house to its former glory and create a museum. The process was completed seven years later. The Davenport House Museum has received many prestigious awards.

Exhibitions worth seeing

The three-story interior has stunning details, such as intricate plasterwork and a staircase that seems to float in the air. The various rooms are furnished with period furniture and decorated with wallpaper and lighting to reflect how the house would have looked when it served as Davenport’s home. The interpretation is based on research that included an inventory taken at the time of Davenport’s death and the sale of his estate. The Preservation Society also used biographical records. The museum’s 500-item collection includes ceramics, textiles, and historic children’s toys. The centerpiece of the collection is a drawing of the house’s exterior façade by local artist Christopher Murphy. It was originally part of a set of drawings that the artist completed in the 1920s called Five Beautiful Doors in Savannah. The back of the house,

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A Southern plantation house, a large, usually two- or three-story mansion, was a visible symbol of the wealth of a planter in the southern states of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Stone Mountain Park features such a house and its associated buildings. All of these buildings, dating from between 1783 and 1875, were moved from their original locations and carefully restored in a single Antebellum Plantation complex.

In colonial Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, the first plantation houses tended to follow British vernacular forms, such as houses with halls and parlors and houses with a central passageway.

The more grandiose structures of the later colonial period generally followed neoclassical styles, although some very early and rare Jacobean structures survive in Virginia. And in the southern part of what became the state of Louisiana, plantations reflected French colonial architectural types, some with Spanish influences, which remained in trend even after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. After the War of Independence, Federal and Jeffersonian neoclassical styles became dominant in formal plantation architecture.

Large parts of the South outside of the original British colonies, such as Kentucky and Tennessee, did not see major settlement until the early 1800s. Although large parts of Alabama and Mississippi were settled around the same time, there were areas of these states, as well as parts of western Georgia and southeastern Tennessee, that did not experience large-scale settlement until after the removal of the Indians in the 1830s. Very little formal architecture existed in these newly settled areas, with most houses being hewn logs until the 1840s. Many of these wooden houses had a common “dogtrot” type plan.

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In apartment No. 1 of the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, Mitchell moved in with her second husband, John Robert Marsh, who was best man at her first wedding, to Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. Here she worked on chapters of a novel that became one of the legendary works of literature in the southern United States.

Mitchell began writing the book in 1926 while she was recovering from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. However, instead of publishing her work as quickly as possible, she tucked each chapter into separate envelopes and hid them around the house. The resulting novel, Gone with the Wind, is still read and studied today, mostly because of its idealized description of the pre-war South, as well as its complicated protagonist Scarlett O’Hara, who may have been the first fully developed female character in American literature.

Visitors to Margaret Mitchell’s home can see her Underwood typewriter among exhibits dedicated to the book and movie Gone with the Wind, and wander through the writer’s home, recreated as it probably was when she lived there (but complete with hints of her interest in erotica).

When you take this tour of Margaret Mitchell’s apartment and the areas that influenced her life, you will be able to explore the complex issues Gone with the Wind raised.

During the tour, you see both sides of the coin – the popularity and criticism of the book.

This tour will help you understand the difference between historical fiction and historical fact.

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