Manship House Museum

Charles Henry Manship, Civil War mayor of Jackson, was born in Maryland, where he apprenticed to a chairmaker and trained as an ornamental painter. Attracted to Jackson in the 1830s by its building boom, he advertised his services as a painter and found work on the construction of the State House, now known as the Old Capitol. Soon he opened a shop of his own, where he sold paints and fine wallpaper.

During Manship's long career as an ornamental painter, he also held several public offices; in 1857, at the age of forty-five, he built his Gothic Revival "cottage villa," a home in striking contrast to the Greek Revival mansions for which the South was famed. The unpretentious but commodious house was built to accommodate Charles and Adaline Daley Manship's large family of fifteen children. Ten of those children lived to celebrate their parents' golden wedding  anniversary at the Manship House in 1888.