Thoroughly Moderne: An Architectural Gem with a Spicy History

by Ann Gilbert

Covington insurance executive Henry Hood was tramping through woods east of Mandeville in the late ’70s when he came upon what he called a white elephant. He had found the huge, unfinished brick mansion—with only gaping holes for windows—that was begun in the 1930s by William G. Rankin, a member of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long’s administration. Hood had heard about the house, but had never seen it. He was trying to find it for his friend Peter Uddo, who was interested in opening a restaurant on the northshore.

The 8,000-square-foot home in the Moderne Style (see sidebar) had sat unfinished and empty for decades. One reporter called the castle-like structure “a ruin to avarice.” Rankin, who was the commissioner of the state’s Department of Conservation, had bought the land from the Salmen Brick and Lumber Co. in 1934, although the sale was not recorded at the courthouse until 1939. Following a series of indictments, he served prison terms for fraud and embezzlement. The property, with the half-completed villa, was seized in November 1940 for non-payment of taxes and sold at public auction in March 1941 for $6,000 to the Southern Sanitarium and Medical Missionary Corporation of New Orleans, an affiliate of the Arkansas-Louisiana Conference of Seventh Day Adventists.

Uddo purchased the structure for $200,000 in 1977. After many hours of research, he had located three living members of the church organization. When the New Orleans restaurateur bought the place, one newspaper said there was going to be “new life at the notorious site.” The article described the property as “both sacred and profane,” recalling both the jailed state politician who started construction and Father Adrian Rouquette (Chata-Ima), the priest who, in the late 1800s, ministered to the Choctaws in the area.

Uddo called the structure “the castle,” and his dream was to open a resort appropriately named Le Scandale. He hired Covington architect Arthur Middleton to flesh out the commercial endeavor on paper. Uddo never began the restoration of the property, however, although he lived in the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds. One day, as he was frying fish, visitors arrived: Justin Wilson and his wife, Jeannine Meeds. The famed Cajun storyteller and television show host and his wife were looking for waterfront property in St. Tammany.

“My jaw dropped when I first saw it,” Meeds recalls. “It looked like some giant prehistoric thing. I was awestruck. What an extraordinary building. But it was a ruin, with no plumbing or electricity and unfinished walls.”

Restoration

The Wilsons bought it in ’89, lived in the caretaker’s cottage during restoration and moved into the house in ’92. One probably shouldn’t use the words restore or renovate, because essentially the structure was almost a “shell with trees growing inside, as some rooms had mud floors,” Meeds remembers.

In an effort to do what Rankin’s architect might have done, Meeds went to Germany to study Bauhaus, the most important and influential school of modern design at that time. (Having lived in Germany as an exchange student during college, she had some familiarity with the language.) She then began restoring the villa for use as their home, Justin’s headquarters and the venue for his cooking series.

During the restoration, Meeds met masons in Lacombe who had worked on the Rankin house in the ’30s. She says, “There are generations of people who, as children, played in that ruin.” The Choctaws probably camped at the site for centuries, as evidenced by the arrowheads Meeds found when landscaping.

One of Meeds’ first thoughts after acquiring the home was to get it listed on the National Register of Historic Properties. That was easy to accomplish because of its association with the so-called “Louisiana Scandals” and its statewide architectural significance. Donna Fricker, of the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation, wrote in the September 1991 issue of Preservation in Print, “The conspicuous consumption lifestyle of those individuals (in the ’30s) was a major topic of commentary at the time. A cartoon showed a home tour and read, ‘Now show us the super mansions the political racketeers built.’ Clearly the most evocative (home) of the era from an architectural standpoint is the Modernistic villa of William G. Rankin.”

In preparing material to have the house added to the National Register, Fricker said, “It is amazing that over the years, the house was not demolished or butchered in a ‘restoration’ project. It looks just as it did when ‘the sheriff got ahead of the contractor,’” she said, quoting author Harnett Kane’s 1942 book Louisiana Hayride.

The Villa Today

The two-story, 12-room mansion has two major elevations—one faces the bayou and one faces forests. It is constructed of brick, steel and concrete. Several balconies overlook the land’s natural beauty. A curving two-story bay wraps the grand salon, which was to be Rankin’s gaming room. There are six bedrooms, including the three gained from converting the three-car garage into guest bedrooms for Wilson’s planned cooking camp. Five air-conditioning units and two expansive kitchens (one Meeds calls the prep kitchen) were installed. The house also has a basement.

There are spacious living quarters on the second floor, including a living room, master suite, small kitchen and a huge office, where Meeds managed Wilson’s books sales, lecture commitments and television series. Large double doors shut off the private area, which can be reached by an elevator and two sets of stairs. Two more guest bedrooms are upstairs. In Rankin’s day, heat would have been provided by coal, and the concrete drive down to the coal chute, now closed with glass block, still exists.

Meeds’ 65 acres are surrounded by Fontainebleau State Park and Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge. She has a view of Cane Bayou and is near Lake Pontchartrain. Wildlife is prolific: deer, fox, bobcat, wild hogs and coyote.

When Meeds and Wilson purchased the property, trains still ran on the tracks in the area. These railways have now been transformed into the Rails to Trails path for bikers and joggers.

The home became the center of national attention when Justin filmed his cooking shows there. (He could catch the bass, trout and crabs he prepared right outside his door.) The first series, appropriately called Louisiana Cooking: At Home, was taped in the grand salon. It might have been a little incongruous, with Justin in his country garb against the backdrop of Gerry White’s 8-foot glass sculpture hanging above the mantel. Justin taped two cooking series there, produced by WYES-TV and Justin Wilson & Associates. For the second show, they built a set reminiscent of an old farmhouse-style kitchen. The Big Branch Wildlife Refuge grand opening party, with Congressman Bob Livingston and Senator Bennett Johnston in attendance, was hosted by the couple in 1994. Justin died in 2001.

Prior to Katrina, wedding receptions and conference gatherings, such as the Great Louisiana Bird Fest, were held at Meeds’ home. During the hurricane, the second floor was a safe haven for eight family members and friends. “It was awesome to be in the midst of such power,” Meeds recalls. Friends had warned her to keep the roof drains cleared of leaves, so during the storm she was out on the second story balconies with rakes and brooms. She had brought a pirogue and life preservers upstairs in preparation for the anticipated huge Lake Pontchartrain surge.

The house received two severe blows in the storm, extensive roof damage and the loss of acres of timber—Katrina claimed most of the mature trees surrounding the home. Meeds had difficulty getting someone to harvest her downed trees, so, independent and self-reliant, she bought a sawmill and began doing it herself. More than three years later, she is still trying to bring her “awesome home” back to life after the whipping by the storm of all storms.
It will be the second time she saves Rankin’s monument from oblivion.

Sidebars:

William Rankin and the “Louisiana Scandals”

In the so-called “Louisiana Scandals” between July 1939 and November 1940, there were some 50 indictments, involving almost 150 persons and about 40 organizations and firms. Nearly 50 total years of imprisonment were imposed and four suicides followed the exposures, according to Donna Fricker in Preservation in Print, September 1991.

In his 1942 book Louisiana Hayride, author Harnett Kane describes William Rankin as he faced interrogation: “He appeared at length before the grand jury, fainted and was revived, wrung his hands and wept as he was questioned.” Kane writes that among Rankin’s many transgressions, the conservation commissioner “owned the boat firm which did hundreds of thousands of dollars of business with his department,” and used state money and prisoners to build a house for his personal use. In July 1939, Rankin was also charged with mishandling funds appropriated for his department for the construction of the geology building on the LSU campus.

In October 1939, he was accused of purchasing an $11,000, 40-foot yacht with Department of Conservation funds and presenting it as a gift to Governor Richard Leche. The indictment stated that department personnel were used to maintain and staff the pleasure craft. Rankin served one-year terms in both state and federal penitentiaries for fraud and embezzlement. In 1940, he was indicted by a federal grand jury for violation of the Hot Oil Act, the shipping of oil in interstate commerce in excess of established limits. His sentence for this was suspended, Fricker said.

Louisiana Cooking’s Justin Wilson

The appearance of his trademark red bow tie and greeting of “How y’all are?” heralded the opening of Justin Wilson’s cooking shows, which are still a Sunday afternoon staple of New Orleans’ public television station WYES. That his shows still air is a testimony to the timelessness of his personality and wit, as he passed away in 2001.

Wilson never considered himself a chef, but used Cajun cooking as a backdrop for his humorous storytelling. He began his career as a safety engineer traveling around the state inspecting warehouses and giving presentations. During his forays into Southwestern Louisiana, he picked up Cajun tales, storytelling and cooking. To get his audience’s interest, he began weaving stories he had heard into his presentations.

Over the years, he authored many cookbooks, storybooks and albums of Cajun humor and created and hosted several different series of cooking shows for public television.
Jeannine Meeds produced some of those shows at the Rankin house. She remembers, “The oral tradition has always been strong in Louisiana, and he took advantage of that. But the stories he never put on records—the ones he told in his kitchen—were the funniest.”

As Wilson would add, “I ga-ron-tee.”