Built around 1804 by a wealthy Sea Island cotton merchant, the Verdier House is the only Federal-style mansion in Beaufort open to the public. The exterior is restrained — symmetrical, white-painted, with the high foundation and double porches typical of the period — but the interior has been restored room by room to its early-nineteenth-century state with original and period furniture.
Tours run hourly and last about forty-five minutes; the guides are good on the social and economic history that built houses like this one, including the indigo and cotton trades and the lives of the enslaved Africans whose labour underwrote them. It is the best single way to understand how Beaufort came to look the way it does.