Special Projects

Hurricane Katrina Recovery Efforts

A home in Gulfport, Mississippi.


Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’ final home.

Colonial Williamsburg, in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, sent a team of conservators to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to assess damage to historic structures caused by the 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Colonial Williamsburg team was among the first three teams of preservation professionals to arrive in Mississippi to conduct building assessments.

The assessment team, comprised of current and former Colonial Williamsburg employees, included: Thomas Taylor, director of architectural collection management and conservation; Roberta Laynor, assistant manager of architectural collections management; Lindsay Hannah, architectural conservation fellow; Caroline Warner and Travis Falk, architectural conservation interns; and Bill Barlow, historical architect with the National Park Service. The team, working under the direction of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, conducted building assessments in Bay St. Louis, Pascagoula, Pass Christian, Pearlington, and Gulfport’s 2nd Street District between December 5 and December 9, 2005.

A second team returned to the Gulf Coast from May 15 to 19, 2006 to complete in-depth assessments of two significant properties: Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’s last home in Biloxi, and the LaPointe-Krebs House in Pascagoula, believed to be Mississippi’s oldest extant building. This team included the six Colonial Williamsburg members of the first team and also Cary Carson, Vice President of Research and intern Erin Kuykendall.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation received two awards for their efforts. The Vernacular Architecture Forum awarded the Foundation their “Above and Beyond” service award for Gulf recovery efforts. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History awarded the Foundation a resolution of commendation for their assistance in the post-Katrina recovery effort.

The team’s experiences and recommendations from the first trip are summarized in the full report, “Katrina Damage Assessment Project, December 2005.”