THREE CURIOSITIES OF DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE stand within a few blocks of each other in the Carrollton section of Uptown New Orleans, each having long occupied a quarter or more of their squares: the cruciform Gothic Revival Wilkinson house at 1015 South Carrollton, completed in 1850; the Wrightian 7929 Freret, built for banana importer Salvador D'Antoni in 1917; and the tall Colonial 925 Burdette Street, perhaps, at least until recently, the most visible, and perhaps the least commented upon.
Contained within the vertical mass of 925 Burdette Street is an older raised house, itself the apparent remodeling of an earlier structure, that was bought in 1917 by Mr. and Mrs. Donald Ambrose Maginnis, a cotton broker and his wife then in their 20s with a two-year-old son. Remarkably, the house remained alone on its enormous parcel until 2021, occupying the square footage of its original lot that had been increased by the Maginnises with additional purchases to the river side of the property. The house remained virtually unchanged from the time of a dramatic 1928 alteration of the prior building up to its diminishment in 2020, a 92-year iteration very much, as were the Carrollton and Freret architectural anomalies, to its original occupants' apparent affinity for symmetry and disinterest in the local architectural vernacular.
By all accounts the Maginnises led a very active life during their years at 925 Burdette. But the history of the house began nearly 40 years before, if not before, the property's discoverable chain of title going back to 1834. Walter M. Smallwood bought the property in 1878; a representation of the house appears on the Robinson insurance map of 1883. Later Sanborn insurance maps offer more details than do their Robinson counterparts, and suggest the presence of a typical center-hall raised house, which, as a recently discovered photograph reveals, it indeed was. The bones of it live in place today.
Walter M. Smallwood arrived in New Orleans from Missouri after being named Postmaster of the city on July 30, 1868. During his year's tenure, Smallwood was also listed in city directories as an "oil, glass, and glassware broker." Apparently, his heart wasn't in such a curious hybrid line; by 1871 he was, according to directories, both pursuing law once again and working as an editor at The New Orleans Democrat before moving to the Times a few years later (the papers merged in 1881). Smallwood and his wife, née Emeline Reinhard and known as Emma, brought with them to New Orleans their daughters Mattie and Bessie; the family moved uptown from Baronne Street to Pitt before settling in 1878 on Burdette Street in the former town of Carrollton in what Smallwood family records describe as a former plantation house. A rare photograph of it in the Smallwood family collection bears this out; what became 925 Burdette Street may indeed predate the Civil War and possibly have once been at the center of a relatively large spread in Carrollton before it was platted, and certainly before the suburbanizing district's annexation to New Orleans in 1874. After Walter Smallwood died at what the family referred to as "Arcady" on December 6, 1884, his journalistic legacy would grow in the form of his daughters and granddaughters. Mattie and Bessie carried on in journalism, blazing a trail for women in the field; their daughters would take it even farther. Mattie worked as a newspaper correspondent, later using the byline "Catharine Cole"; she has been described as the first paid woman journalist in the country. Mattie's daughter Flora Field, better known as Flo Field, became a reporter for The Times-Democrat while living at 925 with her family; she also became a playwright. Not to be outdone by her sister, Bessie became one of the first female press agents in the country as well as a vaudevillian, performing with her husband and five children. Bessie married Bernard C. Shields, a lawyer, city councilman, state legislator, and camera buff; their daughter Sydney Shields made perhaps the biggest splash of all, moving from the vaudeville circuit to a successful career on Broadway. (Walter M. Smallwood's great-great-granddaughter Sue Shields Marchman describes her family in more detail here.)
The circumstances under which 925 Burdette came to be auctioned off by Honor in 1917 are unclear. Chain of title indicates that he may have lost it in foreclosure, with the Dixie Homestead Association acquiring it. While an auction was advertised prominently in newspapers, Donald Maginnis, who could have known Honor through business and possibly through the mutual interest of their families in Ocean Springs as a summer retreat, may have had prior knowledge of it. Whatever the nature of the transaction, the sale of 925 Burdette to the Maginnises on May 9, 1917, was reported in The Times-Picayune two days later. According to the paper, Donald Maginnis paid $15,000 for the house; the reporter considered the price to be low. Curiously, as one corner of the 900 block of Burdette Street was being expanded into something of an in-town estate, the adjacent riverward parcel was being subdivided into urban lots. The Burthe corner had been redeveloped by John Honor, with the Prague house and its large grounds giving way to two new houses, 901 and 909 Burdette, in 1912, and a third lot becoming part of 925's parcel. Donald Maginnis would acquire still more land on the river side of 925: In May 1920 he bought the cottage at 7723 Burthe Street, and, after transferring much of its backyard to 925, sold it the following October. (The Sanborn fire insurance maps below record the growth of the house and its lot.) Mr. Maginnis also acquired a 1908 house across from 7723 Burthe Street as an investment in April 1929 and, interestingly, he bought it from John B. Honor, who had owned it for two years as a city residence. (Honor died in Ocean Springs that August.) In 1929 the Maginnises rented 7730 to their friend Harry Barkerding, newly arrived from Charleston, who would buy it from Mrs. Maginnis in 1944. Only minor changes appear to have been made to 925 Burdette itself after its purchase by the Maginnises—at least during their first decade there.
Curiously, a straight interior staircase between the original first and second floors runs forward toward Burdette Street from the rear of the current second floor to the third, attic level; while this reverse configuration seems odd for what appears to have been a better-utilized second floor in the circa-1900 Colonial Revival iteration of 925, this may be an indication that the staircase dates from the pre–Civil War structure in which it would have led to smaller quarters. This is speculation, however; a forensic architect would be needed to determine exactly how the house evolved and what might date from before the Civil War, from its middle years, and from the Maginnis makeover.
A close friend of the Maginnises was Carl E. Woodward, who in 1923 was cofounder with Thomas B. Denegre of Denegre & Woodward, general contractors. The firm became responsible for the radical 1928 remodeling of 925 in a newer Colonial style of architecture that had become an American suburban ideal by the 1920s, particularly once the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg got underway in the middle of that decade. In 1858, George Washington's Mount Vernon—in serious disrepair—had been sold out of the Washington family to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which began preservation and restoration; replicas of the house appearing at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and at other fairs were seen by millions and adapted by Theodate Pope Riddle, McKim, Mead & White, and other architects for lavish domestic projects in Connecticut and on Long Island that began to appear in shelter magazines such as House & Garden. Another similarity to Washington's Mount Vernon was that the new first floor of the greatly expanded 925 was constructed close to the ground. The new building rose on a concrete slab—an innovation for the era that afforded a graceful entry and connected the interior more closely to its gardens in a way unusual in a city of raised houses built on brick piers. A contract between Donald Maginnis and Denegre & Woodward for $26,500—$468,0000 in 2023 currency—was signed on November 15, 1927. (In 1935, on the Maginnises' Covington property called Mulberry Grove, Woodward would remake the Big House, a sprawling single-story whitewashed brick building, in a Colonial style complementary to 925—there including a version of the Chinese Chippendale porch-roof balustrade of the early Mount Vernon. It is still in family hands and, like 925 Burdette, essentially unaltered in appearance after 87 years. A second smaller house on the Northshore property, also designed by Woodward, mimics the main house and is also still in use by the family. Woodward's firm remains still very active in New Orleans today as Woodward Design+Build.)
The house at 925 Burdette Street was by all accounts the scene of many happy occasions inside and out, its yard inevitably becoming something of a playground for neighborhood children, with Malcolm Maginnis's marmoset Jackie and Mrs. Maginnis's roaming peacock added attractions. Around the corner next to each other on Burthe Street were Harry, Ted, and Bob Barkerding and Walter Carroll; over on Fern were the Schneideau boys. Malcolm Maginnis was moved to wistfulness on seeing the house in October 2012 at nearly 90, two months before he died; the row of tall palms along Burdette was gone, giving the street somewhat of a barren air, but the house itself took him back 80 years. He remembered when Jackie was caught outside during a cold snap and revived with a nip of bourbon and a brief respite in the warming oven of the kitchen's big O'Keefe & Merritt. Was the pirogue still in the attic? Was his go-cart—his Rosebud—still on the roof of the garage? The boat was said to have been placed in readiness as a contingency after the nearby Mississippi River levee threatened to give way in the high water of 1927. The go-cart was left on the roof for safekeeping when its owner was sent north to boarding school at the age of nine, grown out of and never retrieved from its perch before the family left Burdette Street for good.
A highly organized and well-traveled woman with definite tastes, Ruth Hobson Maginnis was a noted gardener who landscaped the grounds of 925 with a schooled eye. She filled the house with a no less well-thought-out combination of French and English furniture, but kept the scheme modern in its lack of any Victorian excess. Never without a sense of fun, she also filled 925 with congenial gatherings. Numerous parties are mentioned in The Times-Picayune, the Item and the States of the day; some were typically genteel, as would befit a founder of the New Orleans Junior League; others are said to have been a tad wilder. On November 7, 1931, the Maginnises were hosts at 925 with his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur B. LaCour, at a debutante reception for the LaCours' daughter, Lorraine, who nine years later would marry William A. Wilkins at Mulberry Grove. Family legend has it that at one point early in the unpleasantness brought on by Black Tuesday, the Charles Monroses, Fern Street neighbors and dear friends, had had their lights turned off due to a neglected bill; a collection was taken up by the couple's larger circle to restore the current. Money left in the pot went to good use to bring in prohibited supplies to celebrate the relighting, perhaps via a stealthy lake speedboat. Lake-cruising boats were also popular during Prohibition for entertaining more or less out of the reach of killjoy authorities. A May 1931 outing of the Maginnises and friends including the Woodwards, the Russell Clarks, the Boatner Reilys, the Fisher Simmonses, and the Richard Ellises aboard William S. Penick's Ottelia ended when Mr. Ellis disappeared overboard—a coroner's inquest at which all guests testified ended in the ruling that Ellis's drowning was an accident, but an air of mystery would endure. Four months later, the group sobered up even further when a polio outbreak at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, affected Russell Clark Jr., who was a boarder along with two of the Maginnises' sons, Donald and John, and their cousin Charles LaCour. Racing pilot and aircraft designer Jimmy Wedell, whose business partner Harry P. Williams would figure into the history of 925 Burdette a few years later, flew Mr. Clark north to his only son's bedside in a record 9 hours and 25 minutes. (Russell Clark Jr. survived his illness but died in the Pacific in 1944.)
With their older sons now away at school and owing to the long illness—some say brought on by high spirits and high living—that had precipitated his early retirement from his seats on the New Orleans and New York cotton exchanges and on the Chicago Board of Trade, and from his local firm, Donald Maginnis & Co., the Maginnises began to spend much of their time north of Covington, then two hours from the city by car. Their New Orleans base became Mrs. Maginnis's mother's house at 3 Audubon Place; prior to his death there on May 24, 1937, at the age of 46, Mr. Maginnis spent his time in Covington raising chickens and camellias as hobbies, while his wife brought Mulberry Grove—a former Ozone Belt health resort—back to life as a private sanctuary for her husband. Every detail of her makeover of the property, from its long approach in from Lee Road, to its vistas, gardens, and outbuildings was overseen with the same extreme care that defined the house and grounds at 925 Burdette Street.
Many stories of the Maginnises on Burdette Street are confirmed by newspaper reports. While the family was away in October 1926, Herman O. Baker, referred to in the press as "the society burglar" and "the daring plunderer of Uptown homes," gained entrance to 925 by posing as a contractor. Baker did his homework by observing residences from his parked Studebaker and by studying social columns to determine when his victims would be out of town. Looking around on a first visit using his contractor ruse on the servants, Baker returned later when he knew there would be in residence just one maid, who was easily tied up; $20,000 worth of silver was stolen. Baker also managed, somehow single-handedly, to load a heavy iron safe into his getaway car parked in back. The $30,000 worth of bonds known to be in the safe were never recovered; Baker claimed to have burned them. (The box itself was, however, found, and later, in Covington, held such treasures as Mrs. Maginnis's grandsons' plans to turn Mulberry Grove into the world's largest go-cart track, the cousins having acquired many new versions of the one possibly still sitting on the roof of the garage at 925 Burdette Street.) Baker was captured by police in December 1927 and sentenced to three to five years of hard labor at Angola. For some reason out on a pass a year later—he was apparently well-behaved and very good at building coffins in prison—Baker stole a car and, in the process of robbing a Tulane Avenue variety store, was shot and killed with his own gun. He died wearing a suit belonging to Donald Maginnis that his wife Myrtle Baker had kept for him. Between bouts of such drama, there were more parties. When a guest accidentally broke a small windowpane in a living-room French door, every one of the rest of the dozens of panes in the room was smashed so as not to leave a clumsy pal feeling badly about the damage—and so the party could continue. At a dinner at which artichokes were served, the same hapless friend, feeling no pain, was served a pine cone as a joke; his game attempt to eat it greatly amused the rest of the table, who, perhaps, had seen a Chaplin film or two in their time. Between the fun and games, in addition to running her house and doing the volunteer work expected of her cohort, Mrs. Maginnis became entrepreneurial. In partnership with her lifelong friend Julia Armstrong Mayhew (later Mrs. Allard Kaufmann), she opened "Julie et Ruth" at Burdette and Maple, just down the street from 925. Uptown matrons flocked to the well-traveled Mmes Mayhew and Maginnis for the sort of lingerie not found at D. H. Holmes or Maison Blanche.
Illustrations: Private Family Collections; New Orleans Public Library;
The Historic New Orleans Collection; The Times-Picayune; LOC
A highly organized and well-traveled woman with definite tastes, Ruth Hobson Maginnis was a noted gardener who landscaped the grounds of 925 with a schooled eye. She filled the house with a no less well-thought-out combination of French and English furniture, but kept the scheme modern in its lack of any Victorian excess. Never without a sense of fun, she also filled 925 with congenial gatherings. Numerous parties are mentioned in The Times-Picayune, the Item and the States of the day; some were typically genteel, as would befit a founder of the New Orleans Junior League; others are said to have been a tad wilder. On November 7, 1931, the Maginnises were hosts at 925 with his sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur B. LaCour, at a debutante reception for the LaCours' daughter, Lorraine, who nine years later would marry William A. Wilkins at Mulberry Grove. Family legend has it that at one point early in the unpleasantness brought on by Black Tuesday, the Charles Monroses, Fern Street neighbors and dear friends, had had their lights turned off due to a neglected bill; a collection was taken up by the couple's larger circle to restore the current. Money left in the pot went to good use to bring in prohibited supplies to celebrate the relighting, perhaps via a stealthy lake speedboat. Lake-cruising boats were also popular during Prohibition for entertaining more or less out of the reach of killjoy authorities. A May 1931 outing of the Maginnises and friends including the Woodwards, the Russell Clarks, the Boatner Reilys, the Fisher Simmonses, and the Richard Ellises aboard William S. Penick's Ottelia ended when Mr. Ellis disappeared overboard—a coroner's inquest at which all guests testified ended in the ruling that Ellis's drowning was an accident, but an air of mystery would endure. Four months later, the group sobered up even further when a polio outbreak at the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, affected Russell Clark Jr., who was a boarder along with two of the Maginnises' sons, Donald and John, and their cousin Charles LaCour. Racing pilot and aircraft designer Jimmy Wedell, whose business partner Harry P. Williams would figure into the history of 925 Burdette a few years later, flew Mr. Clark north to his only son's bedside in a record 9 hours and 25 minutes. (Russell Clark Jr. survived his illness but died in the Pacific in 1944.)
With their older sons now away at school and owing to the long illness—some say brought on by high spirits and high living—that had precipitated his early retirement from his seats on the New Orleans and New York cotton exchanges and on the Chicago Board of Trade, and from his local firm, Donald Maginnis & Co., the Maginnises began to spend much of their time north of Covington, then two hours from the city by car. Their New Orleans base became Mrs. Maginnis's mother's house at 3 Audubon Place; prior to his death there on May 24, 1937, at the age of 46, Mr. Maginnis spent his time in Covington raising chickens and camellias as hobbies, while his wife brought Mulberry Grove—a former Ozone Belt health resort—back to life as a private sanctuary for her husband. Every detail of her makeover of the property, from its long approach in from Lee Road, to its vistas, gardens, and outbuildings was overseen with the same extreme care that defined the house and grounds at 925 Burdette Street.
Once the Maginnises retired to Covington they leased 925 briefly to their friend Frank Clayton Anderson of Mobile, whose family operated the Houston-based Anderson, Clayton and Company, by the 1930s the largest trader of cotton in the world. (After his death in 1939, Anderson's uncle Monroe Dunaway Anderson would endow the cancer center named after him.) Anderson was followed as a renter by another Maginnis family friend, Mrs. Harry Palmerston Williams, the former silent-screen star Marguerite Clark, whose husband, the lumberman and aviator, had been killed in a plane crash in May 1936; the couple had been living in the house that is now the Milton H. Latter Memorial Library. Moving into 925 five months after her husband's death, Mrs. Williams is said to have lovingly maintained her landlord's garden during her three-year tenancy; while apparently content renting a residence, unsure of her long-term plans, Mrs. Williams did put some of her capital into the ownership of Carrollton real estate, purchasing in 1936 the charming 1923 Spanish Revival store building still at the uptown-river corner of Carrollton and Willow. She left New Orleans three years later and would die in New York in September 1940. Mrs. Maginnis continued to lease the house; occupying it from late September 1942 through the winter was Rear Admiral Frank T. Leighton, commandant of the Eighth Naval District, headquartered in New Orleans. Though now widowed, and with Malcolm and Gordon away at boarding schools in New England, Mrs. Maginnis decided to make Covington her permanent residence, keeping an apartment in the city, and in April 1943 accepted the $31,500 offer of Sylvester W. Labrot Jr., president of the American Creosote Works and a well-known sportsman; the transaction closed in June, with Mrs. Labrot's name the one appearing on the title as Elizabeth Gay Labrot. As a garden-club chum of the seller, she would perhaps have been especially attracted to the grounds. The Labrots hired the meticulous firm of Armstrong & Koch to do some repairs and renovations. It may be that, traveling in the same circles, the Maginnises and Labrots had similar tastes, but a grandson of Mrs. Maginnis, after visiting the house for the first time in 1977, reported experiencing a pleasantly eerie familiarity in terms of the house's proportions and detail, both of a distinctly 1920s sort, and reminiscent of the houses at Mulberry Grove. The Times-Picayune reported the Labrots' sale of 925 in June 1947; they moved to Garden Lane. Paying $46,000 for 925 was clothier Philip W. Taxman, who stayed not much longer than the Labrots—a classified advertisement in the Picayune that ran in January 1952 offered household possessions for sale and indicated that Taxman and his family needed to vacate 925 immediately. With real-estate man Poche Waguespack as intermediary, Dr. Edward J. Ireland, professor and head of the department of pharmacology at nearby Loyola University, had purchased the house for a reported $62,350 not long before, his family getting ready to settle down for 925's longest tenancy of all. Mrs. Ireland, who as Elvé Louise Newman received a degree from the Loyola College of Pharmacy in 1943, died at 925 Burdette Street on March 29, 2019, at the age of 98. Among other family members, Stella, her pet tortoise since childhood who has been known to escape from the yard on occasion, survives her.
The house was first offered for sale in the fall of 2019 with the deed restriction that the property could not be subdivided. With no sale forthcoming, the restriction was lifted; on July 23, 2020, the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate website reported in its review of Orleans Parish property transfers for the week of June 22 that the house and its grounds had just been sold to Crescent City Developers for $1,850,000. Partial demolition of the building was underway within weeks toward a goal of lot reconfiguration to accommodate as many as five new residences on the lot; priced at $850,000, the narrowed original residence was placed on the market on September 22, 2020, as an otherwise unrenovated five-bedroom, four-bath house. A year later, five new cookie-cutter residences in a trending Greek Revival–Revival double-gallery style—arguably out of place in this part of town—had been erected alongside the much-modified original 925 Burdette Street. With no takers as an unrenovated property, 925 received a slick if seemingly cosmetic makeover and in mid 2022 was on the market for $2,249,000. In the Garden District, maybe. The house sold for a more realistic $1,625,000 in March 2023. ▲
As seen on January 27, 2024: With more flags than an embassy, 925 is now an inappropriate dull beige and seemingly tiny while also managing to look newer than its five new lot-mates. |
The Historic New Orleans Collection; The Times-Picayune; LOC