By Brenda Ware Jones
Photography by Austin Britt
Whether spent hunting, fishing, hiking, entertaining, or just kicking back from the busy week before, weekends at MeadowBrake are rich with memories in the making.
They found just what they had in mind in 1997, when they came upon one hundred acres of lush forestland in the Black Hawk area of Carroll County, complete with a rustic cabin. They named their woodland idyll MeadowBrake. “It’s a combination of my maiden name, Meadows, and a reference to a favorite boyhood hunting spot of my husband’s, Canebrake, in Dixons Mills, Alabama,” explains Peggy. Along the way, they have acquired extra contiguous acreage, bringing the total to three hundred, with still more leased for hunting. Four ponds, two of which they expanded and stocked with bass, bream, and catfish, complete the property.
The girls grew up loving time spent with their dad out in nature. Brantley, who is now a landscape architect and Main Street Director in Greenwood, is an enthusiastic bow hunter, and Maggie loves to fly fish on her breaks from her job in D.C. with The Washington Post. “We say we raised the city mouse and the country mouse,” says Peggy of their girls, both Auburn grads like their parents.
During the New Year holiday of 2010, things arrived at a bit of a crisis point. “We had daughters there with college friends, a friend with a new baby, and two uninvited flying squirrels in the cabin,” she says. “And that was the end of that. We knew we had to do something.”
“Something,” in her mind, was perhaps a wing added with more sleeping space and a new bathroom with a tub. But Charles Ed, who has a Ph. D. from MSU and recently retired from his job there as a cotton researcher, was of the opinion that the old place wasn’t sound underneath. So they decided to tear the whole thing down and rebuild, using the existing footprint. They began playing with ideas and came up with a rough plan that they drew on a paper napkin one night over dinner with their friend and neighbor, architect Celeste Sanders.
“The goal for the new cabin was to pay homage to the original one, while meeting the current needs of our family by increasing the space. We were really inspired by the concepts of reusing and recycling anything possible, both in construction materials and in the furnishings,” comments daughter Brantley. Delightful examples of this are seen everywhere: the
Acting as her own inspired interior designer, former art teacher Peggy had great fun creating the warm, colorful, and quirky rooms. She assembled a comfortable mix of old furniture that either came with the original cabin or were vintage family pieces; the only guiding principle was, according to her, “everything had to be dog and hunting boot proof!” She mixed pottery collected from estate sales, antique fishing accessories such as poles and creels, and did her own sewing for cushions, curtains, and slipcovers.
With the seasons, the look and feel of the cabin changes, with different baskets filled with whatever is blooming, and collections rotated. In fall, a display of antlers decks the shelves to be replaced in summer with their seashell collection. “We’re not beach people, so this is as close to the beach as we get!” she laughs.
Outdoors, the native plantings form a naturalistic, informal garden around the house, designed by their daughter Brantley. They looked to the woods for plant sources, digging up oakleaf hydrangea, beautyberry, smilax, and red honeysuckle. The daylily bed is an always-evolving feature, as Peggy likes to bring home different varieties culled from friends’ (“and sometimes strangers’”) gardens. Also, they have dug up bulbs from many old homes in Greenville, which re-bloom and multiply each year. A kitchen garden with herbs and vegetables was added a few years ago.
The open house plan, flowing from inside to porch to outdoors, lends itself well to entertaining, and the Snipes family does a lot of that. Anything can serve as a good excuse to gather a crowd; they celebrated Brantley’s passing her landscape architecture boards with a farmer’s market-to-table dinner for twenty-two on the back porch, and for one of Maggie’s recent visits, they threw a big shrimp and crab boil. Steak dinners for Charles Ed’s colleagues, church potluck picnics, birthday sleepovers for friends’ grandchildren, even “porch yoga” sessions for her yoga group have been talked about—MeadowBrake has been the venue for all this and more, with every promise of more to come.