Eugene Magevney

The house is a clapboard cottage of 1836, one of the oldest residences left in Memphis. Magevney, born in County Fermanagh in 1798, was a pioneer teacher and civic leader, and he died in the 1873 yellow fever epidemic. His descendants gave the house to the city, which ran it as a museum. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 6, 1973, closed to the public from 2005 to 2009, and then reopened under the Pink Palace family of museums.

What the plaque says

Eugene Magevney Born in County Fermanagh, Ireland, 1798: immigrated to the United States, 1828; settled in Memphis, 1833. His home was the scene of three important religious occasions in Memphis: first Catholic mass, 1839; first Catholic marriage, 1840; first Catholic baptism, 1841. Magevney, pioneer teacher and civil leader, died in the yellow fever epidemic in 1875. In 1941 the family gave this site to the city.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.5 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• Sun Studio — 0.8 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 1.0 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.1 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.

More markers nearby

• Forrest's Early Home — steps away
• Malcolm Rice Patterson — steps away
• Piggly Wiggly — steps away
• First Tennessee Bank — steps away