Zelda Sayre and the Confederate White House

The house at six forty-four Washington Street was built between eighteen thirty-two and eighteen thirty-five on land connected to an ancestor of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. In February eighteen sixty-one, it became the executive residence of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and his family. They lived there for one hundred days until the Confederate government relocated to Richmond.

The house sat empty and changed hands several times after the war. By nineteen nineteen, the White House Association purchased it with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar appropriation from the Alabama Legislature and moved it to its current location, where it operates as a museum.

Zelda Sayre was born in Montgomery on July twenty-fourth, nineteen hundred, the youngest of six children of a state Supreme Court justice. She grew up in the Cottage Hill neighborhood and became the center of Montgomery's young social scene, a dancer and writer known for her wit and her refusal to stay in the boundaries set for Southern women of her class.

In nineteen eighteen, an aspiring writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald was stationed at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery. He met Zelda at a country club dance. He pursued her aggressively for two years. She finally agreed to marry him in April nineteen twenty, the same week his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published and he could prove he could make a living writing.

They returned to Montgomery in nineteen thirty-one and thirty-two, living in a rented house while Zelda's father was dying. Each was writing a novel. Zelda's was called Save Me the Waltz. Scott's was Tender Is the Night. The house they rented is now the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum.

Montgomery produced the woman who influenced one of the defining novels of the twentieth century and who was herself a serious writer.