Mississippi home's history tied to brokered deals, flying squirrels, hidden hooch — and maybe Al Capone

Pointe Aux Chenes Road in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, is primarily a curvy, winding path that runs more or less parallel to the Gulf Coast to the south. It bends so much because it was not created by humans.

“That was carved out by oxen towing logs to my grandfather’s sawmill,” said Ocean Springs resident Lanis Noble.

Noble, 77, is a writer and historian of the region, partially from study and partially from having been a part of it. One of his favorite homes, 9777 Pointe Aux Chenes Road, is on the market for approximately $1.8 million.

Lynn Wade of Weichert Realtors is handling the listing.

Kent Higdon, the current owner of the 4,820-square-foot house, has been made aware of the home’s significance. “I had so many people come to tell me about it and show me articles,” he said. “It has a lot of history to it.”

Built in 1888, the house has the oldest foundation of any building in the county, Higdon said he’s been told, but use of the property dates back even farther.

“A lot of the main foundations were oyster shells" that Native Americans brought, Higdon said. There are also burial mounds on the property.

The four-bedroom, five-bathroom house was designed and built in a Spanish Colonial style. It has mission-style parapets and red terra-cotta roof tiles. “It was the first house I saw with the stucco walls,” Noble said.

“I think the home should be a historical site or something,” he said. “It’s that important, or at least [former owner James] Leavell was that important to the last century of development on the coast.”

The president of a bank in Chicago, Leavell bought the house as a vacation home in 1942, according to Noble. “He had an old Pullman car [a private train car] that he would ride to Gulfport,” he said.

In 1948, Leavell retired to the property permanently with his wife, Lorna Doone Carr Leavell, for whom the house got its name: Doone’s Gate.

An avid lover of camellias, Leavell was said to have propagated more than 60 varieties of the flowering trees on the property.

“He gave my cousin and me the job of catching the flying squirrels on the property because they would eat the buds on the camellias,” Noble said. “He’d pay us a dollar bounty for each one we caught.”

Noble doubled his payout by bringing the live squirrels to school to sell to kids as pets for an additional dollar. “It was common to see kids with a string in their pocket with a [live] flying squirrel on the end.”

Leavell did some innovative things with the property, such as putting an old railroad tie in the driveway attached to a bell that would ring when cars would drive over it.

But Leavell’s real contribution, Noble contends, was the money and the attention that he brought to the region.

For example, Leavell would throw a birthday party for himself every October, inviting allhis well-connected friends. “Executives, politicians, business leaders from all over the country would come in,” Noble said.

Decisions made at these parties could alter the landscape, such as when a change in state policy was negotiated to allow Chevron to build a refinery in Pascagoula, according to Noble. “That turned out to be a huge boon for the state,” he said.

One possible early guest to Leavell’s parties: Al Capone. Leavell and his friends were apparently fans of gambling, Higdon was told. He even believes he identified the room where all the chips were kept and exchanged for money at the end of the night.

“It’s still got the peephole in the door to see who it was,” Higdon said. “It’s one of my favorite places in the house.”

The story of Capone attending came from one of Leavell’s fellow bankers, who spoke with Higdon. And it isn’t too far-fetched to imagine. According to news magazine Our Mississippi Home, Capone was a frequent guest of The Gulf Hills Hotel in Ocean Springs.

On top of that, Noble said, his uncles used to unload whiskey for another “man from Chicago” who had a neighboring property during Prohibition. “He used to give them a case of whiskey for their trouble,” he said, though he wasn’t aware of any connection between the booze and Capone himself.

For Noble, Leavell represented an unexpected force for his community. After all, Leavell was from the world of elite wealth, and most of the houses in Ocean Springs didn't have electricity until the 1950s, Noble said.

“It’s like the reverse of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’” he said, i.e. the story of a wealthy banker moving to a rural part of the country.

Leavell died in 1974, with Lorna following two years later.

Higdon bought the house in 1997 for an undisclosed amount, according to Jackson County records. The house is part of the 14-acre property Higdon owns, which includes his home on the beach. Higdon’s mother lived in the Doone’s Gate house until her death five years ago.

Higdon finished renovations of the home this year, which included new wiring and plumbing. Over the years, he’s added onto the house, including the Gunite pool, the garage, the bell tower out front and the en suite bathroom in the primary bedroom. He also installed cement tiles in the grass and demolished a wall separating the kitchen from the atrium.

However, he said his favorite part of the property dates back before any known human use. “Pointe aux chenes” translates to “point of the oaks,” named for the forest of Live Oaks that covers the area.

Higdon put lights under a 1,580-foot line of oaks leading from the road to the sea. “It’s beautiful at night, that you can look through those trees and see the ocean,” he said.

All told, Higdon estimates he spent roughly $1 million on renovations. “I think I owe the property. When I leave, it’s better than when I came,” he said. “It’s expensive, but it’s worthwhile.”