| The home of Felix Lebauve (1809-1879), an orphaned French émigré whose years of dedicated, unselfish service to this community as a whole made him one of the most revered and respected of DeSoto County's early leaders. Known as the "Father of Scholarships in Mississippi," he was the first Mississippian to bequeath an endowment to a university for the explicit purpose of establishing a permanent scholarship. Founded to enable orphaned boys from Labauve's home county of DeSoto to attend the University of Mississippi, the ongoing scholarship survives not so much as a memorial to the man as to his ideal of an education available to all young men and his concern for the welfare of orphaned youths. His single-story frame house with its graceful, classically inspired, arcaded gallery is an important regional example of picturesque detailing applied to a frequently used vernacular form. This house was individually listed on the National Register on 29 March 1978, and it was later included as a previously-listed element (element #6) in the Hernando South Side (Magnolia) Historic District, which was placed on the National Register on 30 August 2001. It was designated a Mississippi Landmark on 11 October 1985. It is included in "Victorian Houses of Mississippi" (2005) (pp. 86-87). |