Antebellum mansion taps 'Friends' for painting help

JACKSON, Miss. - Waverley Mansion, near the Tombigbee River between Columbus and West Point, is in need of a paint job. An Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign lets the historic home's friends brush up on their fondness for the spot.

The 1852 house, restored over the past 50 years by Robert Snow and family, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark. It's also their home, and a generously shared one - open for paying tours.

It's that affection family friend Bob Raymond of Columbus hopes to tap. He watched as history lovers Robert and Donna Snow slowly restored the mansion themselves, room by room, opening each as they finished and plowing every penny back into the process. In its original state when they started, "no electricity, no plumbing, no anything," Raymond said, they rehabbed it after decades of neglect. Donna Snow died in 1991; several of their children still live there or close by.

The campaign began last week with a goal of $16,000, based on estimates from contractors for preparing and painting the front. Friends of Waverley Mansion hope to continue raising money to use in 2015 to finish the rest of the house.

"It's a tremendous undertaking, when the house is that big," Raymond said of the antebellum home with a four-story entrance hall - a big octagon stretching up to the cupola. Perk levels from $1 to $12,000 include a peacock feather from the lawn's showy fowl ($10), to a garden party ($1,000).

The campaign will close Nov. 25, Robert Snow's 89th birthday. "Dad says it's the best birthday present he's ever had," Melanie Snow, who lives in Waverley with her father, said.

Waverley factors deep in the area's lore. It was built by Col. George Hampton Young and his wife, Lucy, who came from Georgia with 10 children to the Black Belt Prairie in Mississippi. Young turned the rich river bottom land into a self-sustaining cotton plantation. When the last of the Young children, a bachelor, died in 1913, surviving relatives couldn't agree on the house's fate.

In 1962, Robert and Donna Snow of Philadelphia, then in their 30s, acted on a tip from a salesman who came by their antique shop. Lost on a dirt road near the river and Columbus/West Point, he'd run across "the most magnificent house he'd ever seen," Melanie Snow said, vacant and open with gold leaf mirrors and marble mantels sharing space with squatting critters. The next day, the Snows loaded up the kids in their station wagon to go find it.

"My mom and dad fell in love with Waverley the moment they saw it," Melanie Snow said. "We weren't moneyed people, but we were able to get the house and 40 acres" and began a lifelong restoration.

In its vacant years in-between, "it was the playhouse for the area," she said. "Everybody courted out there," writing who loves who on walls and woodwork as high as they could reach. Campers, hunters and fishermen came. Stories of ghosts made it a destination for Mississippi State University pledges.

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Antebellum mansion taps 'Friends' for painting help