Moody Mansion
The Moody Mansion, also known as the Willis-Moody Mansion, is a historic residential building in Galveston, Texas located at 2618 Broadway Street. The thirty-one room Romanesque mansion was completed in 1895. The home is named for William Lewis Moody, Jr., an American financier and entrepreneur in the cotton business who bought the home from Galveston socialite Narcissa Willis. The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 13, 1994. Tours are offered, and the facilities can be rented out for weddings and other events. Construction and history. The mansion was commissioned by  Galveston socialite Narcissa Willis in 1893. Throughout her life, Willis had asked her husband, entrepreneur and cotton broker Richard S. Willis, to build a grand home. Willis demurred as he preferred to keep his assets liquid to be distributed among his ten children on his death. After Richard Willis' died in 1892, Narcissa had the home she and her husband shared torn down and began plans to build a more opulent home on the site. For this act, Willis was estranged from her family until her death in 1899. Her children never visited the opulent mansion designed to bring them  back to Galveston. Willis lived alone in the house with a single housekeeper who was paid $1,000 a year, three times the wages domestics earned at the time. Willis commissioned an English architect, William H. Tyndall, to design the home. Following the style of Richard Norman Shaw, Tyndall used elements from different cultures and periods, leading to an eclectic appearance. The interiors were designed by Pottier & Stymus, a famous New York firm of the time that also worked for such clients as Thomas Edison, William Rockefeller, and President Ulysses S. Grant. Upon Narcissa Willis' death in 1899, her daughter  Beatrice put the home up for sale. Libbie Moody, who lived in a home nearby the mansion, asked her husband, William Lewis Moody, Jr., to put in a bid for the mansion. After the Hurricane of 1900 devastated Galveston that September, many of the bidders pulled out of the sale. Moody won the mansion for $20,000, a fraction of the mansion's over $100,000 worth. Moody, his wife and four children promptly moved into the home and celebrated their first Christmas at the mansion in 1900. Members of the Moody family resided in the home until 1986 when  it was turned into a historic museum commemorating the Moody family. Hurricanes continue to affect the history of the home. In September 2008, Hurricane Ike led to the flooding of the basement. Libbie Moody's potting room and the period kitchen were lost. As of July 2014, the basement was opened as the Galveston Children's Museum. Layout. The home has thirty-one rooms and five bathrooms. Tyndall incorporated many technological advances of the period including a one-passenger elevator, a dumbwaiter, speaking tubes in the pantry for communicating with the kitchen staff in the basement, heated drying racks in  the laundry room, and lighting fixtures using both gas and electricity. The house also has its own rainwater cistern. The home has four floors. The basement which contained the servant's quarters and kitchen is on the ground floor.