Thirty-one rooms fill the Romanesque Willis-Moody Mansion at 2618 Broadway Avenue, better known today as the Moody Mansion. This thirty-one-room Romanesque mansion was completed in 1895. It was commissioned here by Galveston socialite Narcissa Willis in 1893 after the death of her husband, cotton broker Richard S. Willis, in 1892; she had the home they shared torn down and began plans for this more opulent house.
For building this grand residence she was estranged from her family until her death in 1899—her children, ten in number, never visited the mansion she designed to bring them back. The house later took the name Moody after William Lewis Moody, Jr., an American financier and entrepreneur in the cotton business who bought the home from Narcissa Willis. The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 13, 1994.
Today you can take a tour inside, and the facilities can be rented for weddings and other events. Notice the thirty-one-room Romanesque mansion stretching down Broadway Avenue, a monument to the decisions and dramas that shaped it.