Louise Sneed Hill was the daughter of a very prominent family that came to the Townsville/Williamsboro area in the late 1700’s. She was educated at an elite boarding school in New York City. She was accustomed to the finer things in life, and she spent her adult married life establishing that culture and high society in her new home of Denver, Colorado.
For all her accolades and accomplishments, there’s something else that Hill did: She snubbed the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, of Titanic fame. Mark Pace recounted the story on Thursday’s Around Old Granville segment during The Local Skinny!, and he and Bill Harris discussed her family’s importance in the area.
Louise’s mother died just 11 days after Louise was born, Pace said, apparently of complications from the birth. Louise was baptized on the same day that her mother’s funeral was held; both ceremonies took place at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Williamsboro.
Although Sneed’s Mansion still stands today beside the church in Williamsboro, it is in a general state of disrepair, Pace said. Louise Sneed is a good example of someone from a locally prominent family who moved away from North Carolina and made a big difference somewhere else.
For Louise, that “somewhere else” was Denver, in a state that had just joined the United States a few decades earlier.
“She kind of set the standard for high society in Colorado at the time,” Pace said. “She brought a lot of culture to Denver,” Pace said. Hill created the first published record of members of society and provided instructions on how to get one’s name on the list – chief among them were having lots of money, knowing how to entertain properly and knowing when to pay a visit to someone.
As for her limited interaction with Margaret “Molly” Brown, the story goes like this: Molly and her husband had struck gold – literally – and were fabulously wealthy, but Molly was not accepted into Hill’s circle of society. Only when she became famous for her role in helping fellow Titanic passengers to safety did Hill change her mind about Molly.
Historical documents, including court records, chronicle the goings-on around Sneed’s Mansion, Pace said, which include entertaining and lavish parties to horse racing and general carousing.
“When the court adjourned to Sneed’s Mansion,” Pace said, it meant that partygoers would arrive at 6 p.m., have supper at 10, then dance from 1 a.m. to dawn. Then, if anyone remained standing in the morning, they’d have brunch and head home sometime around noon.
Hill never returned to North Carolina and she spent her last years occupying an entire floor of a nursing home that serves as a hotel today.
And sometimes, Pace said, come reports that the phone from Room 904 mysteriously rings, although no one has inhabited that space since Hill’s death in 1955.
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