If These Walls Could Sing

If you’re admiring the impressive architecture on New Orleans’ Prytania Street—named for a never-built military school, or prytaneum, in surveyor Barthelemy Lafon’s original plans for the Garden District—take special note of 2504. Behind the iron fence stands a statue of Madame Butterfly; a plaque declares that you’ve arrived at the Opera Guild Home. When Nettie Kinney Seebold died in 1965, she willed her house to the New Orleans Opera Women’s Guild. Today the home is rented out for various functions, including weddings, dinners, film shoots, and luncheons, with proceeds going to support the New Orleans Opera Association. Nettie Seebold made just one stipulation as she gifted her house to the guild—that it not be renovated, nor the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century treasures inside sold. The Opera Guild takes care, too, to share the lives and stories of those who owned the home before.

Dramatic by Design

It was the promise of a house filled with sunshine that finally coaxed Helen Lauretta Wight to move south. Her husband Pearl, a trader, had moved from New England to New Orleans in 1866. His then-fiancée wrote to her mother: “[Pearl] writes as though he liked New Orleans quite well. But I think he will not make it his permanent home; at least I hope he will not.”  After their marriage, she stubbornly stayed in Maine with the children who were born and buried, and finally the son and daughter who lived.

The Prytania Street home, a Greek Revival, double-galleried sidehall house in its original design, was built in 1859 for Edward Davis, by his wife’s nephew William Freret Jr. Freret had studied architecture in Europe and under James Gallier. Later, he would be chief architect of the Treasury Building in Washington, D. C. For his aunt and uncle, Freret created a graceful raised cottage in the style of the day. Predictably, the Civil War ruined Davis’s fortunes, and he lost the house.

Its next owner, Pearl Wight, renovated the house in the Italianate style, with a center hall and an octagonal turret, and enclosed the rear porch to create a solarium flooded with light (at which point Mrs. Wight deigned to relocate). Wight’s fame as a railroad receiver, banker, lumberman, and leading Republican grew. Not a week passed without his wife and daughter Pearl appearing in the social columns,  including the younger Pearl’s reign as Mardi Gras Queen in 1907. Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of friend President Theodore Roosevelt, lunched at the house during the 1903 Mardi Gras. Wight died July 4, 1920, his faithful bride following him six days later.

On more than one occasion, pointing to the pictures of Nettie and her sister-in-law Marie, tourists have claimed to feel an otherworldly presence. “It’s them,” one visitor said to her guide.  “They’re so happy you’re here—they’re happy we’re here.” 

The house changed hands frequently until the Seebolds entered the picture. In 1852, W. E. Seebold left Germany and drifted around America until he fell in love with New Orleans, fighting four years for the Confederacy until taken prisoner. After the war, he became the most prominent art dealer and connoisseur in the South. His home was a cultured salon.

Seebold’s daughter Marie studied art under the Spanish-born painter Andres Molinary, who had moved to New Orleans in 1872. Nineteen years her senior, on his deathbed, in 1915, he asked Marie to marry him so she would bear his name. She was delighted with the gift, her groom passing hours after he said, “I do.” Marie never remarried. 

Molinary’s other dying request was to be buried in Metairie under a giant oak next to his friend Major Benjamin M. Harrod, “whom he loved so well.” Harrod, a lover of art and probably also of Molinary, had consecutively married two sisters, producing no children. He is better remembered as the chief engineer for Louisiana, a member of the Panama Canal Commision, and the designer who transformed Metairie Racetrack into Metairie Cemetery.

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W. E.’s son Herman de Bachellé Seebold followed a more prosaic calling as a doctor, although his first love was also art. He dreamed of marrying his fiancée Jeanne Richardson, who had studied painting and sculpting at the Boston Conservatory and establishing their own salon. The wedding was set for June 1916, but Jeanne asked for a postponement to concentrate on her studies.  Herman agreed, knowing she was frail, making her studies irregular.

On the day before the Fourth of July, she was walking with her mother on the fifth floor of the Federal Building in Chicago. She handed the packages she was carrying to her mother, walked to the rail, and jumped. The newspapers gleefully reported: “She fell five stories and her body was crushed to a pulp. Miss Richardson, it was said, was disappointed in love. She was to have married a New Orleans man last month.”

Although Seebold swiftly quashed the lurid fiction, it was a wounding experience.  He supported his fiancée’s mother until her death, and in 1918 he  prepared to go overseas as a medical officer in the Great War. Before sailing, while attending an embassy ball in Washington, D.C., he met Nettie Kinney, whose father’s fortune came from flour mills in the Midwest.  In Nettie he found a kindred spirit who loved the arts as he did, but they only had a short time together before he sailed. 

He cared for soldiers in the influenza epidemic in Germany and saw Bolshevik prisoners with bags of stolen Romanov treasures in Poland.  He returned to New Orleans in 1921, decorated for his wartime service and injured by a train that had struck his car. The next year, he and Nettie wed quietly at her sister’s home in Wichita. 

Where There’s a Will

Herman and Nettie Seebold purchased the Prytania Street house in 1944. They traveled the world and entertained in New Orleans, leaving their own imprint on the house, including chandeliers from the Winter Palace in Russia and Hamilton Palace in Scotland. Herman passed first, in 1950. Nettie continued her support of the arts.  She had studied voice in her youth, and opera was a particular love. 

Following Nettie’s death, the Opera Guild assumed ownership of the house in 1966. In recent years, not only has it provided a home for supporters of opera, but it has also attracted the movie industry, most notably Quentin Tarantino. While filming Django Unchained, Tarantino closed the street, hauled in tons of dirt, and filled it with horses, wagons, and ladies in hoop skirts. The actors rehearsed and relaxed inside before going to the house across the street to film the Mandingo fight scene. Actor Jamie Foxx felt such an affinity for the house that he returned one evening with his sister and cousin to sit down in the parlor at the grand piano once owned by musician Moses Hogan and again channel Ray Charles for the evening, as he had when filming his Oscar-winning role in New Orleans.

The house is open for public tours September to May on Mondays (or year-round through Grey Line Tours) with all proceeds going to support its upkeep and the city’s opera. On more than one occasion, pointing to the pictures of Nettie and her sister-in-law Marie, tourists have claimed to feel an otherworldly presence. “It’s them,” one visitor said to her guide.  “They’re so happy you’re here—they’re happy we’re here.” 

The New Orleans Opera Association is celebrating its 75th anniversary with the 2017–18 season. Visit neworleansopera.org for a full schedule and for more details on the Opera Guild Home.