THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 27, 1995 TAG: 9511270055
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Suffolk's Saturday and Sunday Christmas candlelight tour of historic homes on Main Street will include a four-story brick mansion, built in 1839, that was derided at first as being Riddick's Folly.
Along the two blocks downtown, costumed guides carrying lanterns will direct people to the homes from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. A ticket for the entire tour is $10; for a single house, $4.
My goal is to know every city hereabouts. A good way to begin is in such a tour into the heart of its past. Over the weekend, I dropped by Riddick's Folly and learned from director Susan Ward that in more than a century and a half the Folly proved a wise venture.
Townspeople taunted it at first as being too large - with 21 rooms - too costly, and of an architecture - Greek Revival - few had seen.
Now the city-owned antiquity is Suffolk's cultural centerpiece.
With his wife, Mary Taylor, lumberman Mills Riddick, who farmed Dismal Swamp cypress, had 14 children. In an era of extended families, when uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins lived under one roof, not forgetting guests who settled in for weeks, even Riddick's capacious Folly must have been strained now and then.
Why, during the Civil War, Maj. Gen. John J. Peck and his staff made it their headquarters for commanding 20,000 Union troops.
When a four-post bed of Peck's choosing wouldn't fit in a room, he had the posts sawed short.
Another upstairs room became a hospital. The walls still bear patients' graffiti. One, evidently a Reb's, is plain and forthright: ``Go home and stay there.''
Also of interest is a line of five narrow three-pane windows along the eaves called ``eyebrows,'' precisely what they appear to be.
Toys in the restored nursery include a Noah's Ark because, director Ward said, if they were biblically based, children could play with them on Sundays.
Another room is a museum from the life of Mills E. Godwin Jr., two-term governor of Virginia, first as a Democrat and then, in harder times, as a Republican.
His first term marked expansion of Virginia's educational system and his second, during the recession of the 1970s, retrenchment - a man for every season.
Two rooms are used for temporary exhibits, one of which now offers tea sets from local collectors and families.
In the English basement is space to laud the peanut industry that has buoyed Suffolk. An elephant big as a wash tub, advertising Jumbo Peanuts, can be triggered to raise and lower its ponderous head.
The industry began in Suffolk when Amedeo Obici, who had sold roaster peanuts in Pennsylvania towns, came to Virginia to learn how they were raised, and opened a factory. In 1904, the exhibit notes, 15 of the nation's 20 peanut processing plants were busy in Suffolk and the counties of Isle of Wight, Nansemond and Southampton.
Also in the basement is a large dining room where visitors may buy a slice of cake and tea or coffee or a cake to take home.
``There are good cooks in Suffolk, I'm here to tell you,'' said Kay Rawles, fund-raising co-chairman.
For a decade the mansion housed a school board office and now has the office of the historical society. After sheltering Riddick's family more than a century, it now serves the large community family of Suffolk.
Some folly! ILLUSTRATION: FILE PHOTO
Riddick's Folly, a four-story brick mansion that was built in 1839,
sits proudly on Main Street in downtown Suffolk.
TICKET INFO
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by CNB