Marker Text:
Family residence, W. L. Moody, Jr. built about 1894, and for many years home of Mr. Moody, prominent financier and philanthropist who established the Moody Foundation. Late Victorian architecture said to have been first Texas residence built on steel frame. Has magnificent stained glass windows, ornate ceilings, rare handcarved woodwork. A large handsome home, famed for its hospitality.
NRHP Nomination Form
"ARCHITECTURAL CLASSIFICATION: LATE VICTORIAN: Romanesque
The Willis-Moody Mansion is a 4-story Richardsonian Romanesque building built between 1893 and 1895. The asymmetrical facade employs many elements of this style, such as rounded arches, turrets and heavy stonework, as well as porches, verandas and a portecochere. The mansion's interiors, designed by the New York firm of Pottier, Stymus, & Co., employ decorative themes popular at the tum of the century. With its primary elevation facing south on Broadway, the main thoroughfare in the City of Galveston, the Willis-Moody Mansion's brick walls and limestone dressings appear very much as they did in the mid 1890s, thanks to a meticulous 7-year preservation and restoration project that culminated in April 1991, when the house was opened to the public as the Moody Mansion and Museum.
The Willis-Moody Mansion is of masonry construction on a brick foundation. Masonry features include a pressed brick and rough-faced limestone exterior adorned with white limestone coping, lintels, window surrounds, and arches. While all load-bearing walls are of brick, sections of railroad steel were incorporated as structural elements, primarily to support porch and conservatory floors on the first floor level, but also to permit the 20-foot width of dining room to be spanned by a load-bearing wall on the floor above. The tiled roof is complex in configuration; a large skylight tops the hipped roof of the central block, while pitched roofs cover projecting elements to the east and west, with conical roofs on the house's four turrets. Corbelled chimneys punctuate the asymmetrical roofline.
The second and third stories of the front elevation continue the Richardsonian theme. The southwest corner has a 3/4-round window bay, balanced at the southeast corner by an engaged octagonal window bay. A small gallery with three round-headed arches connects these bays. The third floor centers a gabled dormer with paired windows between two flanking turrets, one conical enclosing a semicircular porch with three limestone arches on the southwest, the other octagonal on the southeast."