Charles Swift came to Alabama in 1880 and married Susan Roberts in 1885. He developed a successful lumber business, including a sawmill on the Bon Secour River. The family raised their eleven children in a sixteen-room Tidewater home called "The Big House." They were active in the Bon Secour community, operating the Post Office in the early 1900s, owning a commissary store for sawmill workers, and building the first one room schoolhouse in the area. The current Swift School and Episcopal Church were built on land donated by Susan Swift. Their children went on to varied careers in public service, education, the arts, medicine, farming, the military, hospitality, and business. On this site in 1882, Thomas Gavins, a descendant of French settlers, built a four-room dogtrot cabin. Around 1898, Charles Swift bought the cabin and surrounding acreage, built a sawmill, and by 1900 had moved there with his wife and eight children after adding a west wing. In 1910, with eleven children, the family enlarged the home by adding a second story, creating a six thousand square foot house with three thousand square feet of porches; two barns and a five-seater outhouse completed the homestead. The last member of the original Swift family who had lived in the home died in 1976. Nicholas Coles later purchased the home and bequeathed the estate to the Baldwin County Historic Development Commission in 2007. The home and grounds opened to the public in 2009 and were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in December 2016 as primary examples of life along the Bon Secour River in the early 1900s.