Grass Lawn

Dr. Hiram Roberts, a Port Gibson surgeon who owned sugarcane plantations in Louisiana, built Grass Lawn in 1836 as a summer house on 235 acres facing the Sound. Sugar in 1830s Louisiana was grown by enslaved people. The house itself was framed of hand-hewn longleaf pine and cypress, held with wooden pegs. John Kennedy Milner, later a Coca-Cola bottler, bought it in 1905, and Gulfport used it as a community center from 1973. Katrina destroyed it in 2005; a period-style replica was dedicated on July 20, 2012.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Biloxi Beach Wade-In Marker — 9.8 mi
  The beachfront parking lot beside the Biloxi Lighthouse where state markers recall the 1959 and 1960 wade-ins that opened Mississippi's public beaches to Black residents.
• Biloxi Lighthouse — 9.8 mi
  A cast-iron tower lit in 1848 on the Biloxi beachfront, kept by women for most of its first century and still in service after Camille and Katrina.
• Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art — 12 mi
  Frank Gehry's pavilions on the Biloxi waterfront, built around the pottery of George Ohr, the self-styled Mad Potter, and the rebuilt Pleasant Reed House.
• Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum — 12 mi
  A Point Cadet museum on Biloxi's oyster, shrimp and schooner past, from the packing houses and the shrimpers' unions to the Vietnamese families who rebuilt the industry.

More markers nearby

• Centennial Plaza — 0.7 mi
• Soria City — 0.9 mi
• Gulfport Civil Rights Wade-In — 1.0 mi
• Mississippi City Cemetery — 1.3 mi