Davenport House

Your Visit

Visiting the Davenport House is essential in experiencing the history of Savannah and its historic preservation renaissance. For information about hours and options for your visit.
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Our Museum

Throughout its fifty-years plus history as a museum, the Davenport House Museum has striven to provide visitors with a true and vivid encounter with a uniquely Savannah story.
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Discoveries

There are currently approximately 500 items in the collection, including furniture, ceramics, lighting devices, and more. Along with approximately 200 fragments found in an archeological dig at the site.
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Calendar

To complement its fine daily house tour, the Davenport House offers before- and after- hours special tours, activities and living history programs throughout the year which enlivens the story it tells.
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December at the Davenport House

Holiday Celebrations

For daily tours throughout the month of December visitors will experience the understated taste of an authentic Federal-style holiday season in Savannah. Tours look at how members of the Davenport household celebrated Christmas and New Year’s when they lived in the home between the years 1820 – 27.

HOLIDAY EVENING TOURS BY CANDLELIGHT

Thursday, December 26 through Monday, December 30, 2013

TIME: 6 to 8:30 p.m.

ADMISSION: $9 adults in advance, $11 at the door; $6 children in advance, $8 at the door

LENGTH OF PROGRAM: The format is open house style. The experience will take approximately 60 minutes. No admissions after 8 p.m.

Glistening by candlelight, the Federal-style home welcomes visitors to an experience emphasizing the end-of-year celebrations of early 19th century Savannahians, including the Davenport household, who lived in the fine brick home on Columbia Square. Light refreshments, music and skilled interpreters, who show visitors through the home, are among the highlights of the presentation.

At the end of each evening there will be a 19th century dance demonstration.

The performance requires that guests be able to walk up and down stairs and maneuver in the candlelit rooms.

Catalyst in History City: Savannah's Davenport House as Home and Symbol

Davenport Museum House At the Davenport House visitors glimpse into the American past when the nation was new and Isaiah Davenport, a young carpenter from New England, achieved success as a builder in his adopted city. The world of 1820s Savannah is presented through the outstanding Federal-style home Davenport built for his household.

Davenport’s fine home was a tangible demonstration of his builder’s skills as well as a residence for his growing family and the enslaved people who worked in the home and in his business. Furnished as it would have been in the 1820s, the museum received a Preserve America Presidential Award for the authentic period restoration.

While the story of the original owner’s time is compelling, the twentieth century history of the house offers a chronicle of dilapidation, rescue, and restoration. Passing out of Davenport family hands in the mid-19th century, the building became a tenement in an unsavory part of Savannah in the mid-20th century. Its survival is a testament to the tenacity of seven Savannah women who came together in 1955 to save the structure from demolition. This action prompted the founding of the Historic Savannah Foundation, which has brought about an architectural renaissance through historic preservation in the coastal Georgia city.

Today, as an historic house museum, the Isaiah Davenport House provides a look at domestic life and aesthetics from an earlier time as it welcomes visitors from across the United States and around the world to historic Savannah.