County of site: Lafayette
Location of site: Old Taylor Rd., Oxford
Phone: (662) 234-3284
Built in the 1840s
The house Faulkner bought in 1930. Built originally in 1848 by a Colonel Robert R. Sheegog for his wife (and known as the "Sheegog place" and later, "the old Bailey Place" when Faulkner bought it), Faulkner renovated the house and made it his home for the rest of his life. He named it "Rowan Oak" after the legend of Rowan tree recorded in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough; according to the story, Scottish peasants placed a cross of Rowan wood over their thresholds to ward off evil spirits and give the occupants a place of refuge, privacy, and peace." ~ Oxford Tourism Council
"In 1930, William Faulkner purchased what was then known as “The Bailey Place”, a primitive Greek revival house sitting on four acres of hardwood and cedar. Colonel Robert Sheegog, and Irish immigrant planter from Tennessee, built the home when he settled in the tiny frontier settlement of Oxford in the 1840s. Faulkner renamed it Rowan Oak in 1931 after the rowan tree, a symbol of security and peace. The house was unoccupied for seven years before the Faulkners purchased it in 1930.
"Soon thereafter, he optioned the surrounding acreage (Bailey’s Woods) and settled in with his wife, Estelle, and her two children from a previous marriage, Malcolm and Victoria. Within a few years, their own daughter, Jill, was born. Rowan Oak was the family home of the Faulkners until 1962, the year of William Faulkner’s death. In 1972, Jill Faulkner Summers sold the house to the University of Mississippi to secure it as a place for people worldwide to learn about her father and his work.
"Rowan Oak was William Faulkner’s private world, in reality and imagination, and he was fascinated with its history. His writings were inspired by local stories of Indians, runaway slaves, old colonels and spinsters who gave china-painting lessons and are interwoven with his own memories of coming of age in a South torn between traditional ways and modern development. Faulkner’s years spent at Rowan Oak were productive as he set stories and novels to paper, ultimately winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1954 for ‘A Fable’. William Faulkner remains one of the most celebrated and studied authors in the world, with conferences, societies and journals dedicated to his life and work." ~ Rowan Oak Museum
"Home to William Faulkner and his family for over 40 years, Rowan Oak was originally built in 1844, and stands on over 29 acres of land just south of the Square in Oxford, MS." ~ Rowan Oak Museum
"Rowan Oak, also known as William Faulkner House, is William Faulkner's former home in Oxford, Mississippi. It is a primitive Greek Revival house built in the 1840s by Robert Sheegog. Faulkner purchased the house when it was in disrepair in the 1930s and did many of the renovations himself. Other renovations were done in the 1950s. The house sits on 4 landscaped and twenty nine acres of largely wooded property known as Bailey's Woods. One of its more famous features is the outline of Faulkner's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Fable, penciled in graphite and red on the plaster wall of his study. Though the "rowan oak" is a mythical tree, the grounds and surrounding woods of Rowan Oak contain hundreds of species of native Mississippi plants, most of which date back to antebellum times. The alley of cedars that lines the driveway was common in the 19th century. The studs of the house are 4"x 4" square cypress, which were hand-hewn. Faulkner drew much inspiration for his treatment of multi-layered Time from Rowan Oak, where past and future seemed to inhabit the present.
"In 1972, his daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, sold the house to the University of Mississippi. The University maintains the home in order to promote Faulkner's literary heritage. Tours are available. The home has been visited by such writers as John Updike, Czeslaw Milosz, Charles Simic, Richard Ford, James Lee Burke, Bei Dao, Charles Wright, Charles Frazier, Alice Walker, the Coen brothers, Bobbie Ann Mason, Salman Rushdie, and others. Writer Mark Richard once repaired a faulty doorknob on the French door to Faulkner's study.
Rowan Oak was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1968.
Rowan Oak Landmark
After its most recent renovations, some of which were funded by part-time Oxford resident and Ole Miss law school alumnus, John Grisham, Rowan Oak was rededicated on May 1, 2005.
"The current curator of Rowan Oak is William Griffith. Past curators include the novelists Howard Bahr and Cynthia Shearer. The original curator was Bev Smith, an Ole Miss alum, who was responsible for finding a great deal of Faulkner's original manuscripts hidden within the home.
"The address for the house was once 719 Garfield Road in Oxford, but the road changed names in the 1980s to Old Taylor Road." ~ Wikipedia