Woodruff-Fontaine House
c. 1871 • 680 Adams
Amos Woodruff moved to Memphis in 1845 as a carriage-maker. He became the president of two banks, a railroad company, a hotel company, an insurance company, a cotton company, and a lumber farm. In need of a home, Amos Woodruff commissioned architects Edward Culliatt Jones and Mathias Harvey Baldwin to build the Woodruff-Fontaine House in 1970. The house was completed in mid-1871, right before the marriage of his daughter in December 1871.
There was a total of three Woodruff weddings held at the home during the occupancy of Amos Woodruff, his wife, and four children, from 1870 to 1883. The first marriage in the house was between his daughter Mary Louise “Mollie” and her husband Egbert Wooldridge. The couple lived in the home until Egbert passed, and Mollie remarried James Henning in 1883. Mollie Woodruff Henning passed in 1917, and it is rumored her ghost still resides in the upstairs back bedroom of the Woodruff-Fontaine House, where her husband passed from illness and her two children both passed shortly after birth.
In 1883, Amos Woodruff fell into financial trouble and was forced to sell the house at a loss to Noland Fontaine. Noland Fontaine and his wife Virginia and nine children. Noland Fontaine was president of Hill, Fontaine & Company, the world’s third-largest cotton company at its time. The Fontaines occupied the home for forty-six years until it was sold to Rosa Lee for the expansion of her art academy in 1930, which moved to Overton Park in 1959. The house remained vacant until Victorian Village Inc. and the Association for the Preservation of Antiquities restored the Woodruff-Fontaine House as a museum and event space.
Copy Source: With gratitude to Perre M. Magness, author of the book Good Abode, for portions of this narrative.