Employees of developer Webber Brewer, from left, Mike Cudo, Chris Carter and Don Gray work to hammer in nails to form one of the supports that will permit one of four pre-Civil War log cabins being moved from 3501 Lee Road to Freetown Road. (Brian Loden The Vicksburg Post)

[1/2/05] A home believed to be one of the oldest in Mississippi is being moved to save it from being demolished for a planned new residential development.

The home is being moved from near Lee Road and Old Highway 27 to where its new owners plan to restore it, off Freetown Road in northeastern Warren County.

The nucleus of the home is four one-room cabins that are believed to have been built on the property about 1840 or earlier. The home has been donated to the Vicksburg Foundation for Historic Preservation by Mike Kavanaugh, whose family owned the home for generations.

The second of four pieces of the home, which had been used as its dining room, made the eight-and-a-half mile journey in about 35 minutes Thursday afternoon. It joined the former master bedroom, which had already been moved to the home’s new site.

The preservation group’s president, Nancy Bell, said the deal worked out well for all concerned.

“It is our mission to save endangered buildings,” Bell said. “Had this not occurred, then it would’ve been demolished.

“Mike knew how important the building was, and so we were just fortunate that he did donate it,” Bell said. “The foundation knew the Brewers were also interested in historic buildings.”

Kavanaugh plans to sell the home site and about 61 acres mainly between Lee Road, Old Highway 27 and Indiana Avenue for new home construction. Vicksburg developer Webber Brewer and his wife, Carolyn, agreed to accept the home on the condition that they move and restore it.

Webber Brewer’s crew of six began preparing the home to be moved at least three weeks ago.

“This is one of the oldest I’ve ever seen, and I’ve reworked quite a few of them,” Webber Brewer said as workers continued preparations. “They strictly used hewed-out trees. There was no lumber involved.”

Carolyn Brewer said she and her husband plan to take about a year to reassemble and restore the home in its new location, in woods about one-quarter mile from the road, and then to move into it.

In its new location “it’ll look more original” than it has since an upstairs, exterior lumber and other features have been added, Webber Brewer said.

The original, hewed-log surfaces of the sides of the cabins that became interior walls have remained exposed while the exterior walls have been covered by other siding material. The exterior walls will now go “back to logs,” and will be restored using, among other materials, the mortar-type filler of a traditional log cabin, Webber Brewer said.

Carolyn Brewer said she loves old homes, and the couple has been restoring and moving into them for about 25 years, she added.

“We were bitten by the bug a long time ago,” she said.

The partnership that plans to purchase the property around the former Kavanaugh house plans to build a “very elegant subdivision” that will eventually have about 125 homes, said Vicksburg real estate agent Harley Caldwell. Plans call for dirt-moving for the first street in the subdivision to begin around early February, weather permitting.

The area of the former Kavanaugh home has a place in Civil War history separate from the history of the 1863 campaign and siege for which Vicksburg is best-known, Vicksburg National Military Park historian Terry Winschel said.

Near the home was one of two camps in the South where Confederate and Union forces exchanged prisoners, and the camp operated before and after the 1863 fighting here, Winschel said. The other prisoner-exchange camp was in Virginia, he added.

In April of 1865 more than 2,000 Union prisoners from the camp had been placed on the Sultana, a steamboat that exploded and sank after leaving Vicksburg and heading up the Mississippi River. The tragedy left 1,800 people dead, making it the worst maritime disaster in history, Winschel said.

The area to which the home is being moved was occupied by the Wrenn family, members of whom were among Vicksburg’s earliest settlers.