The original stained-glass windows over the central staircase have been preserved.
Editor's Note: In the version of this story published in the July issue of Memphis Magazine, we misidentified Alex Boggs. He is the area and marketing director of the Huey's restaurant chain.
The stone home known as Hillcrest on Peabody Avenue in Midtown is not just historic in its own right. Even the construction materials have deep roots in Memphis history. The story, passed down to Hillcrest’s current owners, goes like this: “When they were building this house, they were doing construction downtown on the Shelby County Courthouse,” says Alex Boggs. “A giant slab was on a truck going to the courthouse, and the truck fell over,” says Jenay Boggs. “The slab had fallen and broken, and they were like, ‘Well, we can’t use it now.’”
Hillcrest’s construction foreman saw the pile of marble rubble. “They asked what they were going to do with it, and if they could buy some of it,” continues Alex. “And [the courthouse contractors] said, ‘Actually, you don’t have to buy any of it. If you want some, just take it.’ So they took stone that was supposed to be for the façade of the courthouse, and layered it down on the porch right in front of the entryway.”
Hillcrest stands as one of the grand old homes of Central Gardens.
By the time Alex was in school at Grace-St. Luke’s, in the same neighborhood, Hillcrest had acquired a long and storied history. (See “The History of Hillcrest" below.) “We grew up on Evergreen, but I went to Grace-St. Luke’s, so all of my buddies lived right around here,” says Alex. “We were very familiar with this house. I mean, when you drive past it, you generally recognize it and remember it.”
The stones on the front porch were originally intended for the Shelby County Courthouse, under construction at the same time.
Alex and Jenay started dating when they were sophomores in high school and have been together ever since. Last year, the Boggs were living on Eastmoreland in Central Gardens. Jenay was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, who would be joining Reagan, age 8, Thomas, 6, and Henry, 3.
“We had a growing family, so we were looking for a bigger house,” says Jenay. “One of the things that really brought us to this house was that we always wanted more yard — and more yard in Midtown and Central Gardens is obviously a rarity! And so with us having chickens, ducks, bees, the dogs, and with all the kids that we want to encourage to be outside as much as possible, having more of a piece of property and some more yard was the number-one quality we were looking for in a new home.”
The view from the front entrance to the main staircase is stunning.
Around that time, friends from the Grace-St. Luke’s community called to tell Alex that they were moving, and offered them a first look at Hillcrest. “We toured it with them, which was a very cool perspective, getting to tour it with the current family who lived there. They got to tell us what they had done, what they wished they had done, what they would have done if they had four kids. It was in shockingly good shape. The previous two owners did a really good job taking care of it.”
Although it meant moving sooner than they were planning, the Boggs family decided to take the leap. Then, something else happened sooner than expected. “We were hoping to have already moved in before baby came, but then baby came early,” says Jenay. “So we lived in Le Bonheur for 72 days. My mom and our children lived at our other house, and this one just hung out for a while. We moved here on a Monday, and brought Samson home on that Friday.”
With a premature newborn who still required supplemental oxygen, the first days in Hillcrest were difficult and fraught. But the family quickly acclimated to their new surroundings — and the kids loved their much bigger rooms.
“The people we bought the house from left three really nice framed photos of the house from, I believe, 1916,” says Alex. “On top of that, they left us stacks of the Central Gardens historical books, home tour books, and Midtown architecture books that the house is mentioned in. And they left us dozens and dozens of photos. So that was kind of the wake-up call — you are a part of something a little bit bigger.”
The Fabric of Memphis
Alex Boggs is the son of Thomas Boggs, drummer for The Box Tops and co-founder of Huey’s, the burger joint whose original location on Madison Avenue helped nurture Midtown’s bohemian reputation. Now, Huey’s has ten locations, stretching from downtown to Southwind. “We sell cheeseburgers for a living,” Alex says. “We like to think we do a wonderful job,”
Naturally, when the subject of Huey’s comes up, Alex and your correspondent had an animated conversation about which Huey burger is the best. We agreed on the Señor Huey, which adds jalapeños and pepper jack cheese to the basic burger template — although Alex says he has been gravitating lately toward the trendy Smash Burger, a recent addition to the menu. “The old-school folks will tell you it all started with the Smokey Melt. That was really what you think of as the original greasy Huey Burger at the dive bar,” he says.
Much of the beautiful original woodwork, shown here in the living room, has survived.
Alex currently serves as the area and marketing director of the Huey’s corporation. “We look at our legacy as Huey’s and as the Boggs family as two things. Dad always said, when you take care of the community, when you do things out in public, they’re going to, in turn, take care of you. We live by that motto. It is one of the biggest pieces of our culture, the biggest things that we talk about as a family. Fortunately for me, that’s a huge part of my job right now. The easiest way to describe what I do is, everything else that is not inside a Huey’s. We did the huge Le Bonheur fundraiser last month [Le Bon Appétit], and we’re involved in everything from Soup Sunday to Zoo Rendezvous — all of the big, longtime Memphis community events, charities, and fundraisers. We love being a part of those, and we make it a point of emphasis to support them, to get out there and have a public face at all of those.”
Oscar and Bodhi also call Hillcrest home.
But the second part of the legacy is newer, he says. “As we’ve continued to grow, it’s our employees. We’ve always prided ourselves in taking good care of our employees and being a place that people want to work.”
The pandemic era was a great example of that. “It was never an option for us to just shut our doors for a couple of months or a year or so and then reopen,” he says. “Our number-one goal was safety and our number-two goal was: How do we keep our employees on payroll? How do we make sure they can take care of their families in probably the toughest time the restaurant industry has had in the past 150 years? We were very proud that we kept every single employee we had on payroll.”
Built for a Big Family
Hillcrest sits on a double lot in Central Gardens; Jenay points out that they share their back fence with four houses on Vance. The kids have their own playground situated on the north side of the carriage house, and they make use of it.
“We’re kind of the opposite right now than with most families,” says Alex. “A lot of times you’re begging your kids to go outside, turn off the TVs. Sometimes, we look at each other, kind of laughing. We’ll be sitting at the back door, hollering, “Kids! You’ve got to come inside!”
The billiard room was originally the gentlemen’s parlor.
The kids share their yard with a menagerie that includes two dogs, Oscar and Bodhi. A coop full of chickens supply the Boggs and their neighbors with fresh eggs. In the small strip of land on the west side of the carriage house sit four beehives.
“Our queens are named after our grandmothers and great grandmother — Ann, Helen, Lacey, and Elaine,” says Jenay. “I got into beekeeping about 10 years ago. Unbeknownst to me, my great grandmother, Lacey, was a beekeeper. This is a story that’s been handed down, but she had really bad arthritis. She was in her 90s, keeping bees. One day, one of her hives ended up toppling over, the bees came out, and she got stung quite a lot. She survived and was fine — but after that, she had no more arthritis for her remaining days.”
The dining room once served as the ladies’ parlor.
Inside, many of the turn-of-the-century details of the 7,500-square-foot house have been preserved, such as the dark wood detailing, the ornamental metal door signs that say “Push” and “Beware of the dog,” and the stained-glass windows over the landing of the central staircase.
“I think our previous home was 3,500 square feet,” says Jenay. “In terms of the number of rooms, it’s not that much bigger — but the room sizes are just gigantic! There’s so much storage in this home, it is incredible. It is almost scary because you can very easily put things away, things that you probably should just get rid of, and forget about it.”
The photographs of the home taken around 1915 show that the family’s spacious parlor was once the dining room. A pass-through window to the kitchen has been added at some point in the last century. “What is now our dining room was the ladies’ parlor. What is now the pool room was a gentlemen’s parlor,” says Jenay.
The owners have filled their home with many paintings by local artists.
Most of the home’s current furnishings came with the Boggs from their previous domicile, including family pieces such as the antique buffet in the dining room, and a small desk which was gifted to Jenay’s father by his family doctor when he became a physician himself. All of the art on the walls come from local artists. Alex’s collection of music posters and prints adorn the pool room and the finished attic space on the third floor that was once a nanny’s quarters, but which had a copper-top bar added by a previous owner. “I got a couple of Huey’s bar stools out of storage and threw them up there,” says Alex.
The home’s many fireplaces were built to be coal-burning, so they are shallower than standard wood fireplaces. Several of them have been converted to gas logs. Young Reagan’s favorite fireplace has been updated with green tile work.
“We love the fact that this house was built for a big family,” says Alex. “So many kids have grown up here. We always joke that if there are already ghosts in the house, we’re on their good side because we filled it with a huge family.”
Jenay is aware that they are the latest in a long line of prominent Memphians who have called Hillcrest home. “We feel honored, honestly, to live here,” she says. “There’s so much history, and it’s so beautiful, and you can feel the positive energy in this home. We love it so much.”
Courtesy of the Gravure Illustration Company, Chicago, IL
The impressive home as it looked in 1912.
The History of Hillcrest
In 1912, the Gravure Illustration Company of Chicago published a nine-volume series of books called The Artwork of Memphis. Full-page photographs depicted homes, streets, parks, and areas of our city the editors considered “artwork.” Among the residences featured was the “Goodman-Richardson Home” — better known to Memphians as “Hillcrest.”
Calling the property two names suggested that two different families occupied the impressive stone mansion, when in fact it was occupied by a mother and daughter, both widows. Walter and Corinne Goodman were originally from Mississippi. After moving here in the late 1800s, he made a fortune as founder of the Goodman Cotton Company, president of the Dixie Electromagnet Company, and director of a railroad line called the Lakeview Traction Company.
They had a daughter, named Corinne after her mother. She eventually married John Richardson, a wealthy planter with offices in Memphis and Liverpool, England, who also served as vice president of the Memphis Cotton Exchange.
Walter Goodman died in 1883. When son-in-law John died suddenly on Christmas Eve, 1905, the two widows decided to share a home. They hired the architectural firm of Jones and Furbringer — creators of such landmarks as the Claridge Hotel, Shrine Building, Masonic Temple, and other landmarks — to design a grand residence for them. Since the granite-faced structure stood at the highest point along then-new Peabody Avenue, they named their new abode Hillcrest.
Corinne Goodman passed away in 1914. Her daughter continued to live at 1554 Peabody until 1932, when she moved to New York City, where she died in 1969, at the age of 99.
In 1933, Madeline Gott purchased the property. A clerk at Levy’s Ladies Toggery, she was also a widow. Husband Samuel Gott’s death certificate identified him only as a “traveling salesman,” but he must have been a very good one to afford Hillcrest. During this period, quite a few Memphians could say they lived at 1554 Peabody. Judging from classified advertisements, part of the home, as well as the original servants’ quarters out back, were rented out over the years. They had plenty of space; the house is more than 7,500 square feet.
In 1957, Dr. Aden Barlow, a surgeon with the Stevenson Clinic on Poplar, purchased Hillcrest, but financial difficulties forced him to give up the home. A mortgage company held a foreclosure sale in 1962, with Sadler & Co. Realtors running ads headlined “HUGE! HANDSOME!” and asking buyers, “Do you have need of an extraordinarily large property?”
John Jerit appeared on the November 2005 cover of our magazine while his family was living at Hillcrest.
A local attorney apparently thought so. Palmer Miller and his wife, Betty, purchased the house that year. Just like the original owners, they shared the home with another family, that of Dr. Byron Garner, a specialist with Lee’s Orthopedics.
Over the next several decades, Hillcrest was home to prominent Memphians. Stephen and Kelly Laffey took possession in 1999. The director of research for Morgan Keegan, Stephen later became the brokerage firm’s president and chief operating officer. His family didn’t stay long at Hillcrest, though. The Laffeys moved to New England in 2001, where Stephen became mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island.
Next came John and Susan Jerit. John, vice president of the American Fireworks Company, conceived special glasses that transformed pyrotechnics into a psychedelic light show. His new company, American Paper Optics, also produced more than five million pairs of glasses for the growing trend of 3-D movies, a feat that put him on the November 2005 cover of Memphis Magazine.
The most recent owners have been restaurateurs. Tyson and Karen Bridge moved to the Peabody property in 2013. Tyson operated the Paramount, The Vault, Backlot, and other downtown establishments.
Finally, just last June, Alex and Jenay Boggs moved into Hillcrest. If the Boggs name sounds familiar, he’s the son of Huey’s co-founder Thomas Boggs, and now serves as the area and marketing director of the restaurant chain. — Vance Lauderdale
