1113 Chartres St
New Orleans, LA 70116, USA

LeCarpentier-Beauregard-Keyes House - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:

There is unfortunately no way of foretelling which of any one year's crop of moderately priced private residences will become famous. Thus, the early records of many a house famed today are lost or destroyed. This is so of the Beafruregard House. Fame came to it fortuitously because General P. G. T. Beauregard took residence there in 1866. He never owned the house and lived in it only two years. This was sufficient, however, to persuade the General Beauregard Memorial Association, a group of preservation-minded ladies, to purchase the house in 1930 and save it from a then imminent commercial fate.

The LeCarpentier-Beauregard-Keyes House is one of the outstanding landmarks of the Vieux Carre in New Orleans. ^ It was built in 1826 from plans of Francisco Cc^rejollea^architect, by James Lambert, architect-builder for Joseph LeCarpentier, a successful auctioneer. The land on which it stands was originally part of the grounds of the Ursuline Convent. Contract for the house was executed before Felix de Armas, Notary Public and is extant in the Notarial Records in the Civil District Court House in New Orleans. The structure is not extremely characteristic of the majority of the Vieux Carre houses and is in the spirit of the Paladian character. The Greek Revival iron rail and fence (a later change, as can be seen from the contract drawings) could hardly have been designed by the original architect of the building.

The Beauregard Memorial Association struggled to keep the house from disintegration. Rooms were rented, the basement was let to Alcoholics Anonymous and the philanthropic Wm. J. Warrington used the courtyard buildings as shops for helping indigent men. During World War II, Frances Parkinson Keyes, the novelist, seeking a place to live while writing a book with a Louisiana background, rented rooms in the house from the Beauregard Memorial Association. In the next few years Mrs. Keyes gradually restored, repaired and made livable parts of the house at her own expense and in 1944 she leased the main floor rooms and later the basement also. Mrs. Keyes assumed and paid off the mortgage to the house when in 1945 the Beauregard Memorial Association donated the house to her. She continued her work of restoration with the architects Koch and Wilson and in 1955 the Memorial Association transferred its interest to the Keyes Foundation which the author had formed largely to make permanent arrangements to preserve the house for posterity.

Mrs. Keyes died in July 1970 in Beauregard. House and the Keyes Foundation, opening the house to sightseers, soon realized that the house was as much a memorial to Frances Parkinson Keyes as it was to General Beauregard.

Beauregard House, 1113 Chartres St New Orleans, Orleans Parish, LA

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