Magevney and Mallory-Neely Historic House Museums closed

Editorial by Linda Raiteri

Magevney House  (photo by Mike Cromer)

Eugene Magevney, born in 1798 in County Fermanagh, Ireland, settled in Memphis in 1833 where he taught in a small private school. Four years later, he bought the house on Adams that now bears his name. A strong believer in education, Magevney was instrumental in establishing Memphis’ first public schools. He also assisted in the founding of St. Peter, the first Catholic Church in Memphis. In the Magevney Historic Home Museum, visitors see the dresser that served as an altar for Memphis’ first Catholic mass. In 1840, his bride-to-be, Mary Smyth, arrived from Ireland with a horsehair-over-wood trunk that visitors see in the bedroom of the house. Mary and Eugene married in the parlor, the first recorded Catholic marriage in Memphis. The first baptism, in 1841, was that of their first daughter who later founded the Dominican Congregation of the Sacred Heart in Houston, Texas.

In 1857, Eugene Magevney became historian of the newly formed Old Folks’ Society. According to Goodspeed’s 1887 History of Tennessee, the Society was formed “to rescue from the oblivion into which it is rapidly sinking the past history of our city and county; to … preserve the memories … of …the hardy and revered pioneers, who came hither to woo from the wildness of the unbroken wilderness, our present heritage; to transmit … the events to which the progress of our city and county have given birth… and to cultivate amongst the survivors and descendants … the general good feeling which should characterize those who were the common sharers of the privations of an early border life.”

It was with a similar intent, that the descendants of Eugene and Mary Magevney deeded this ante-bellum house to the City of Memphis in 1941 with the stipulation that the home be preserved and available to the public without charge. The Magevney House Museum, one of the Pink Palace Family of Museums, was closed in March because of cuts in the Memphis city budget.

On a gloomy morning over a year ago, members of the Downtown Memphis Museum Association, a consortium of nineteen downtown museums, met at the now closed-to-the-public Mallory-Neely house to discuss Museum Saturdays, an initiative to bring more area residents to downtown area museums. We entered the imposing 1850s home by the side door, the traditional entrance for servants and entertainers. We were enveloped by the warm scent of scones that Kate Dixon, then Manager of Historic Properties for the Pink Palace Family of Museums, was baking in the modernized kitchen.

There were ten or twelve of us, all representatives from attractions such as the Fire Museum, Power House, Mud Island River Park and Museum, the Center for Southern Folklore, Peabody Place Museum, the Metal Museum.

Gathered round the highly polished dining table — 90% of the furnishings in the Mallory-Neely House Museum are pieces owned and used by the original families — in a room that had witnessed the lives of the people who polished the silver, who drank the coffee, who toasted their brides for over 150 years, we 21st century museum professionals felt a continuity with the children who had giggled through the dining room into the kitchen, with the cooks who shushed them, with the cabinet makers who carved the luxurious curves of the mantel, the cotton factors who loudly voiced their opinions about politics, the sisters, wives, and mothers who, perhaps longed for, won, and then exercised their right to vote.

This is what historic house museums do. They allow us to know that our present is shaped and formed by the past. It’s something you can’t quite get from books.

According to Kate Dixon, over 40,000 students have participated in 10 different curriculum based social studies programs designed by the Historic Properties staff. The stories of both the middle-class Magevney House and the upper-class Mallory-Neely House incorporate African-American as well as European-American history. It is our history, our culture, our art.

Mallory-Neely House (photo by Fred Asbury)

Built for a banker in 1852, the Mallory-Neely house was sold to a cotton factor during the Civil War, then sold again in 1883 to another cotton factor, James Neely, and his family. After the Neely’s youngest daughter, Daisy, married Barton Lee Mallory in 1900, the couple returned to the house where they raised their three children. In 1908, the Mallorys hired Annie Bess as a nurse to their three children. Annie Bess, an African- American whose husband was the chauffeur for the next door neighbors, the Fontaines, worked and lived in the house for the next 54 years as nurse, companion, caretaker. Daisy Neely Mallory was 12 when her parents bought the house. By the time of her death at age 98, she had lived there 86 years.

In Daisy Mallory’s music room, there is a framed letter W.C. Handy sent her after she broke her hip. In her dining room is an 1890s wallcovering that Kate Dixon describes as “essentially linoleum for the walls”. In an upstairs bedroom is a 1948 model television. One wonders what Daisy Mallory and Annie Bess thought watching their neighborhood change? What did they think when Elvis drove by in a Cadillac? When Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated?

Neither the eloquent Mallory- Neely House nor the plainspoken Magevney House will ever match the attendance records of Graceland. But the question remains: had Eugene Magevney not stayed in Memphis, had he not helped establish St Peter’s and our public school system, would Isaac Kirtland have come here to work in banking and insurance? Would the Neelys and Mallorys and the cotton industry that supported them have gone some place else? And if that had happened, would Memphis have been the place where Sam Phillips and Marion Keisker, Dewey Phillips and Elvis Presley came together to birth a sound? Would you and I be here?

It’s more than seeing Linda Bailey’s woven hair ornaments in Forty Shades of Green (a Memphis in May exhibition of contemporary Irish arts and crafts at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens) and realizing, from having seen ornaments woven of human hair on display at the Magevney house, that yes, Linda Bailey’s contemporary art is rooted in a tradition of women’s work that goes back at least 150 years.

It’s more than a stubborn holding on to the past. The first historic house museums in America were established in the 1850s. Most of them survive on shoestring budgets and volunteer staffs. Even the professionally run Colonial Williamsburg, which can count on regular attendance of one million visitors a year, has had to cut back. Memphians are extremely fortunate to have professionals trained in history and the preservation, maintenance, and restoration of historic houses. But to maintain these standards of professionalism in programming and preservation, museums need the support of the people they were designed to serve: you and me and our children and grandchildren.

Lin Heathcott, President of the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, the organization that manages the French style Woodruff-Fontaine House next door to the Mallory- Neely House, says they have been hard hit by the closing of the two other public homes in Victorian Village. “People think we’re closed too”, she said.

In August 2004, when the Pink Palace Family of Museums' Magevney and Mallory-Neely Houses cut back their hours, the members of the Downtown Memphis Museum Association were concerned. When the announcement was made in March 2005 that two of the three historic home museums in Victorian Village were closing and no one knew if they could reopen, it felt as though a family member had been wounded in a drive-by shooting.

Whether these historic house museums, which have been entrusted to the city of Memphis, survive depends on all of us. How much do we care about our history, our culture, our art?

Portions of this editorial were previously published in The Commercial Appeal.