I started the day by dumping our waste tanks. After all the bad stuff had gone down the sewer hookup, I did my usual pipe washing routine when I spotted some alarming defects in our 3 year old sewer hose. After that, the first item on today’s agenda was to find an RV parts store and replace the soon-to-be-embarrassing-if-not-replaced defective parts. We headed to a place called Ron Hoover RV & Marine here on Galveston Island where we soon found the name should be Ron Hoover Marine because they had no RV supplies. A nice guy at the desk told me that Ron Hoover has two locations and only 10 miles away was Ron Hoover RV & no boats. $50 later, we were out the door with a new 20′ system just like the one I am replacing.
A couple years ago we passed through this area and stopped at a Galveston landmark, the Moody Mansion. The folks operating the place at that time only offered accompanied tours a couple times a day and it did not work out with our schedule. Now we are back in Galveston with ample fooling around time so we drove over and walked up to the admission stand which is located in the adjacent garage. Now the Mansion has self-guided tours with little electronic doodads that explain what you are looking at when appropriate.
The Moody family seemed to own a good bit of Galveston with interests in cotton, shipping, insurance and banking along with most of the other really profitable businesses in town. They accumulated considerable wealth and bought the Mansion from a lady named Willis who started building in 1895. In 1900, the Moody family moved in for an eighty year stay.
The Mansion is pretty impressive from the outside. Exterior walls are built from limestone block and clay brick. Interior walls are mostly beautiful woodwork with a considerable amount of casing and molding around everything. The walls in a couple downstairs rooms are padded fabrics with ornate designs. The main bathrooms even have bidets in addition to toilets, massive cast iron tubs and showers and marble sinks. There are whistle tubes to communicate with the butler’s pantry, an elevator, a dumbwaiter and both gas and electric lighting. The bedrooms are spacious. One bedroom even has a big tub across from the bed. The dining room is particularly opulent with amazing woodwork on floors, walls, doors, windows and the ceiling. These folks had a nice house.
There are about 30 rooms you can wander through on the first and second floors. The basement and third floor are not open to the public. I understand the third floor was never really completed on the interior and was not really used by the residents. There was ample living space for a big family using just the first and second floors. The basement must have housed the kitchen at one time because there is a dumbwaiter in the butler’s pantry that only goes down. The house must have had a great architect because the systems were state-of-the-art for 1900. Two furnaces in the basement (coal and wood), central ventilation, central heating, electrical and gas distribution and full water and sewer plumbing are installed in addition to the whistle tube system. The occupants must have been comfy.
The Moody Mansion is on Broadway/J Street/IH-45 at 27th right in the middle of town. Entry fee is $12 a head.
A few pix of the house can be seen if you click here