Eudora Welty's Jackson, Mississippi, Home Is a National Historic Landmark

The grounds include a garden that Welty and her mother tended for decades.

Updated on October 19, 2021

On a quiet stretch of Pinehurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi, there stands a Tudor-style home where the writer Eudora Welty lived for decades. The house on Pinehurst was Welty's home address for almost 80 years, and it's where she wrote many of her award-winning stories and novels. Now a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the house draws visitors from around the world who are interested in seeing the property that inspired the prolific writer for so much of her life.

Welty's parents built the house, which is located across the street from Belhaven University, in 1925. Her mother, Chestina, planted a beautiful garden on the property, and both Welty and her mother tended it for years. Built into distinct rooms, the garden is filled with native and heirloom plants, flower borders and arbors, and more than 30 varieties of camellias. Chestina, who also loved roses, designed the garden's original plan so that there would always be something blooming, no matter the season. In her work, Welty is known for her descriptions of plants and gardens, and that close attention likely began at home in the grounds she called "my mother's garden."

Welty, whose work as an accomplished photographer predated her literary successes, wrote in an upstairs bedroom of the house, and the works that she produced—including the novels Delta Wedding and The Optimist's Daughter, and the short stories in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty—went on to win the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Medal of Freedom, among countless other honors. She passed away in 2001 at the age of 92, and in 2004, the home was designated a National Historic Landmark. Visitors now regularly make their way to Jackson to tour Welty's house and garden on Pinehurst Street.