2023 Road Trip: Goodwood Mansion Tour (5/5/2023)

Friday, May 5, 2023 (continued)
We were the only participants of the 10:00 tour of the Goodwood Mansion. After Senator Hodges passed away in 1940, his wife Margaret continued living at Goodwood. Later in 1948, she married Thomas Hood, an army officer who was renting one of the guest cottages. When Margaret died in 1978, Hood began restoration of the property as it looked in the 1920s, so that he could leave it to the Tallahasse community as a museum and greenspace.

The entrance hallway was very spacious

Priceless antiques in the entrance corridor

A beautiful William Miller piano that belonged to the Hodges

The piano is inlaid with rare blue or green sea snail nacre
and likely has abalone keys

Nearly every room has a custom fireplace;
the door once led to the servant stairway,
which was removed and replaced with bathrooms

One of two ceilings with secco painting (as in
painting on dry plaster, rather than wet/fresco)

This parlor contains 19C German pierced wood furniture

The library

The library also has a secco painted ceiling

One of the first floor bathrooms

The grand staircase has so-called
coffin niches, which allowed coffins
or large furniture to be taken down
the stairway using the niches to
negotiate the curve or corners

Upstairs full bath

A half-tester bed has a canopy extending
over only half the bed

A four-poster tester bed

It was here that we learned that the pineapple, which we have come to associate with hospitality, is in fact, not appreciated by the enslaved people and their descendents. Although the tradition originated in the Caribbean islands where the indigenous people placed fruit outside their villages to invite the Spaniards to visit, it soon became a Euro-American symbol of wealth and prestige, power and privilege, essentially built on the backs of the enslaved. Even later, after the pineapple was introduced to Hawaii by the Spaniards, a plantation system developed exploiting indigenous and imported workers.

A woman's closet

There were several of these pink
Bohemian Mantel Lusters, which are glass
Victorian candlesticks with dangling prisms
to project more light

A brass bed that once was in a guest cottage

Another half-tester bed

A linen wardrobe that was left behind
 full of linens 

This was Margaret Hodge-Hood's bed

An artist was brought in to paint the ceiling medallion to match

...and to paint the design on the bathtub!

A porcelain pocket watch holder
results in a nightstand clock

Dining room set with one of many sets of chinaware

The pantry contains the abundance of chinaware,
which includes some uranium glass; we were shown
how they glow under a black light

Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q has changed its look since
changing the name to Sonny's BBQ in 2013, so we
missed the nostalgic effect when having lunch here

Next: Tuskegee Airmen National Histpric Site.