The Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage Area presented the Land Trust of Mississippi Coastal Plain with a grant worth $14,000 Thursday afternoon.

The grant will be used for the restoration of the smoke house at the Shaw Homestead historical site in Poplarville.

Jeff Rosenberg, preservation coordinator of the Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage Area, said this is the second grant the Land Trust has received to repair and restore one of the buildings next to the house. The first grant was for $28,000 and was used to repair one of the sheds.

“We appreciate the grant we received today in order to keep restoring this house, which has been around since about the early 1890’s,” Land Trust of Mississippi Coastal Plain Executive Director Judy Steckler said. “This house plays a big role in the history of Pearl River County and our goal is to make it available to the public so we can bring adults and children out here, so they can learn more about its history.”

Over the course of the past two days, AmeriCorps-Mississippi, a non-profit organization from Gulfport, cleaned the house and the surrounding property as part of the process to make it available for public tours.

“This is a great place to learn about how people used to live back in the day, this is a great place to come and visit,” AmeriCorps-Mississippi Program Coordinator Rochelle Ramsey said.

Rosenberg said the house was donated to the Land Trust in 2007 after Hurricane Katrina but before then it stood unoccupied for almost 40 years. He said the house also stood without electricity or running water from when it was first built in the 1890’s until about the late 1950’s.

According to previous coverage, Steckler said that Mary Shaw, the owner of the house, left the house to live with her daughter when Hurricane Camille came ashore in southern Mississippi in 1969. After the hurricane, Shaw never came back to live in the house.