David Davis Mansion

The David Davis Mansion is a Victorian Italianate house with Second Empire details in Bloomington, Illinois, built between 1870 and 1872 by the French-born architect Alfred H. Piquenard for David Davis, a United States Supreme Court justice and later senator from Illinois, as a home for his wife Sarah. The three-story yellow brick house contains 36 rooms and stands on a 4.5 acre estate that includes Sarah's Garden, a Victorian cut-flower garden, along with period outbuildings such as a carriage barn and stable. Davis lived there after leaving the Senate in 1883 until his death in 1886, and the mansion has operated as an Illinois State Historic Site and museum since 1960, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975.