POWERGRAMS

17 one morning. Her employee was about to lose her apartment lease, so Schmidt offered her the single-wide mobile home that had housed the first bakery. "We were in a place where I couldn't take a cut in pay," says Handmore. "But where I took a decrease in income, God took a decrease in my bills." A SHOWPLACE ON THE EDGE OF THE BLUFF It's not that Kirk Brooker doesn't buy into the romantic legend of one of Demopolis' most famous citizens building a mansion near his home as a wedding present for a daughter; it's just that he thinks it was more likely a 10-year anniversary gift. Brooker says the idea that Allen Glover built Bluff Hall in 1832 for his daughter, Sarah Serena, when she married Francis Strother Lyon, doesn't quite add up. Her father was a widower for a decade while the wedded Sarah and her husband lived at Glover's house on Capitol Street. "When he remarried, she was allowed to move out with her husband," says Brooker, operations director of the nonprofit Marengo County Historical Society (MCHS). "Glover built houses for most all of his children as a wedding gift, including Bluff Hall. It's just that Bluff Hall was a very late gift." Lyon was a lawyer and planter who served in both the U.S. and Confederate Congress. He drafted a state Constitution that was adopted by the Constitutional Convention. "The man was unreal," says Brooker. In 1967, Bluff Hall opened its doors to the public after 135 years. Today, it yet shines as the state approaches its bicentennial. Restoring the old masonry and frame home after it had been divided into apartments for three decades, the MCHS has returned about 75 percent of the original furnishings to Bluff Hall, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. The backyard ends on White Bluff, overlooking the Tombigbee River 40 feet below, which was some 80 feet down before dams pushed up the water level a half-century ago. A log cabin in the backyard was found within the walls of a Victorian house torn down years ago, then saved and moved onto the grounds. "We're told by experts it is most likely one of the original French settlers' log cabins," says Brooker. Wood columns inside were added to the 10-foot ceilings in 1872 on the owners' 50th wedding anniversary, purchased from a supply built for, but never used at, Gaineswood. Black and white-veined Italian marble fireplaces are a highlight. A famous Wilhelm Frye painting of White Bluff includes the artist sitting next to Lyon with his father-in-law's steamboat on the Tombigbee behind them. A copy of the painting is in the living room. A dining room, butler pantry and kitchen was added in the late 1840s with a 1-foot-wide brick firewall separating the kitchen from the rest of the house that Brooker says was "unheard of at the time." In addition to a large fireplace and hanging iron pots similar to those seen in Colonial Williamsburg, there is a cellarette built by slave Peter Lee, who was a skilled craftsman loaned to members of the upper class. Lee was allowed to keep the money from his outside work and eventually bought his freedom. "The storage unit he built in 1850 is like today's Yeti," says Brooker. A walnut bookcase nearly touching 21st-century smartphone, top, blends with 19th-century Mennonite kitchen traditions as Pat Toews bakes "monster cookies." The aroma of fresh biscuits fills the store. Bluff Hall opened to public in 1967. Original cabin near bluff.

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