The John Mark Verdier House: Lafayette Slept Here

On Bay Street in downtown Beaufort stands a house that has welcomed notable visitors for more than two hundred years. The John Mark Verdier House was built around eighteen oh four by a prosperous merchant of French Huguenot descent named John Mark Verdier, who had accumulated substantial wealth from trading indigo and Sea Island cotton. The house he built reflects that wealth: a Federal style structure with two levels of columned porches facing the street, wide rooms with high ceilings, and elegant interior woodwork.

In eighteen twenty five, when the Marquis de Lafayette made his celebrated return tour of the United States, the last living general officer of the American Revolution visiting the country he had helped to found, he came through Beaufort. Accounts of the visit place him at the Verdier house, which was used as a reception space for the occasion. Lafayette's tour of the country was a national event, and his presence in a small South Carolina town was a significant moment.

After Verdier's death the house changed hands several times. During the Civil War it served as the Union army's adjutant general's office. In the years that followed it fell into disrepair and at various points in the twentieth century faced demolition.

Local preservation advocates organized to save it, and it opened as a house museum in nineteen seventy five. The house is now owned and operated by the Historic Beaufort Foundation. It is one of the finest examples of Federal period architecture in South Carolina, and its story is also the story of the Sea Island cotton wealth, built on enslaved labor, that funded the entire antebellum culture of the Beaufort district.