Beacon Homes

The Living New Deal calls Beacon Homes the first low-rent housing project in Mississippi. Architects Landry and Matthes planned one-story duplexes and two-story row houses, 45 buildings of three-and-a-half and five-and-a-half room units, with brick walls, concrete first floors and gas-fired space heaters. Clearance of substandard housing began in 1939, and W. J. McGee and Son finished the project in 1941 at a federal cost of $466,943. It was built for white families. Beacon Street, where it stands, is now Leontyne Price Boulevard.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art — 1.1 mi
  Mississippi's oldest art museum, a 1923 memorial to a timber heir in Laurel, with a major Native American basket collection and no admission fee since it opened.
• Amos Deason House — 6.2 mi
  A Greek Revival house in Ellisville where a Confederate major was shot in 1863, tied to the history of the Free State of Jones.
• African American Military History Museum — 26 mi
  The wooden USO club that opened in March 1942 for Black soldiers training at Camp Shelby, now a museum of African American military service from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.
• Forrest County Courthouse and Dahmer Memorial — 26 mi
  The courthouse where Hattiesburg held Freedom Day on January 22, 1964, and where a memorial now honors Vernon Dahmer, killed by Klansmen in 1966.

More markers nearby

• Dr. King Visits Laurel — 0.5 mi
• Masonite Corporation — 0.6 mi
• Triangle Homes — 0.6 mi
• Oak Park School — 0.7 mi