Victorian Village spreads out in front of you, a neighborhood of extraordinary nineteenth-century mansions that tells the story of Memphis's Gilded Age prosperity and its remarkable survival through catastrophe. In the 1870s, Memphis was nearly destroyed not by war but by yellow fever. Three devastating epidemics struck between 1873 and 1878, killing more than five thousand people in a single summer and driving two-thirds of the city's population to flee.
Memphis lost its city charter and was reduced to a taxing district. But those who stayed — many of them Irish and German immigrants who had developed some immunity — rebuilt. The grand homes that line Adams Avenue and adjoining streets were constructed in the 1880s and 1890s by a new generation of merchants and professionals who were determined to make Memphis not just prosperous but beautiful.
The Woodruff-Fontaine House and the Mallory-Neely House are the grandest survivors. Walking through Victorian Village is walking through the ambition and grief of a city that nearly ceased to exist and then willed itself back into being.