Boyd House "The Oaks"

The Oaks was once the center of a four-acre urban farmstead reaching north to what is now Boyd Street and west to North Street, with a barn, a detached kitchen, a smokehouse and a greenhouse beside the house. James H. Boyd, a Jackson mayor, built the Greek Revival house about 1853, and three generations of his family lived there until 1960. His widow, Eliza Ellis Boyd, stayed on until her death in 1902. In 1960 the grandchildren sold to the Colonial Dames of America in Mississippi, and a corporation now runs it as a house museum.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — 0.5 mi
  A state museum in downtown Jackson, opened in 2017 beside the Museum of Mississippi History, that tells the movement from 1945 to 1970 through the people who made it.
• Old Capitol Museum — 0.7 mi
  Mississippi's Greek Revival statehouse of 1839, where the legislature voted to secede, Hiram Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate and the 1890 constitution was written, now a free state museum.
• Farish Street Historic District — 0.8 mi
  Jackson's Black business and cultural center, where Medgar Evers kept the NAACP office and furniture-store owners recorded the blues, now a quiet National Register district.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 3.2 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Willie Morris — 0.3 mi
• The "Cotton Bale" Battery — 0.4 mi
• Manship House — 0.4 mi
• Greenwood Cemetery — 0.4 mi