Boyd's Life Blog: Mississippi Art The Wolfes and the Lazy Log Lodge

This is a story about memory, and family, and art. This is a story about Mississippi and happiness and a story about love.

Yesterday my sister sent me a text message that she found a painting and wanted to know if it was of the Raymond Lodge; and included a photo of it. Immediately I confirmed that it was indeed a painting of the Raymond Lodge and that it had hung in our grandmother's house for many years.

I believed it was painted by Jackson artist BeBe Wolfe. My sister texted back a photo of the signature, and it was painted not by BeBe Wolfe but by her mom, Mildred. All this opened the most beautiful treasury of memories I had stored away, not forgotten but not visited in a long time.

The Raymond Lodge Painting
As Sent By My Sister

The lodge was the Lazy Log Lodge, about five miles east of Raymond, Mississippi. After World War I, a retired colonel built it, and my uncle Boyd bought it in the fifties. It was a little over thirty-five acres, with a five-acre lake, and when he bought it, there was the log constructed main house, a caretaker's house, a horse barn, a sheep barn, and a pavilion.

It was the site of many company and family gatherings. I learned to ride a horse there and bait a hook there. I told and heard many ghost stories there, and in the days when I barely got to see my dad because his career was so busy, I could spend time with him there.

It had a massive brick barbeque that Kelly, the caretaker, once used to cook enough hamburgers to feed the entire St. Andrews eighth and ninth grade. Some people got two!

Besides the main house being made of logs, I don't know why it was called "lazy log." The colonel built the house himself with trees cut from the land and four sandstone fireplaces, made from the same sandstone quarried in Hinds County and used at the Jackson Zoo and Smith and Poindexter parks.

The horse barn burned down in the sixties, leaving only a mule cart with a broken axel, and the horses were moved to the sheep barn under the levee. The pavilion was storm-damaged in the seventies and had to be torn down. The whole farm was sold in the eighties to finance a project my dad was working on.

The house and the pavilion were on a hill looking over the lake. Mrs. Wolfe must have been sitting in the pavilion when she made the painting. She would have been shaded, but her subject bathed in sunlight. By the colors, it must have been fall. Although I wasn't there that day, I can clearly see it in my mind. I tried to find a photo I'd seen of her painting before to include here, but I couldn't find it. Maybe it was in a book. I'll keep looking.

My Grandparents were big fans of the Wolfe's, both from their studio work and their involvement in Millsaps. I don't know exactly how the painting came to be. Either they commissioned it from her, or she painted it as a gift. I've seen other landscapes she made, but I didn't recognize the locations. From the vantage point of the hill, she couldn't see the levee that created the lake, only the center part of it before smaller hills blocked the rest.

Across the water in the painting is a medium-sized weeping willow tree. There were four weeping willow trees around the lake, planted as saplings by the colonel himself. By the time my dad sold the place, they were massive. There was pretty good fishing under that willow tree, and it was a great place to water your horse. One time my Uncle John said we could walk our horses all the way across the lake from there to the other side, and we did! I was in trouble for getting my pants wet in the lake water, but boy, was it fun.

Veterans of the fabled Dixie Art Colony, Mildred, and Karl Wolfe, settled in Jackson, Mississippi, after World War II. They started a studio and became a part of the fabric of central Mississippi and especially Millsaps College. Some years they were the entire art department at Millsaps. Karl became one of the most famous portrait artists in the state of Mississippi. Mr. Wolfe's portrait of my uncle Boyd Campbell hung at Mississippi School Supply for many years and now hangs in Millsaps College. Boyd also had a portrait done by Marie Hull, which was in my mom's house for many years, then my house, and now hangs in my sister's house. My uncle had the hat trick of Mississippi portrait artists of the 1950s.

For many years, Karl's work overshadowed his wife, but by the 1980s, Mildred became more appreciated for her own work. Both tended toward impressionism, but I always thought she did more than he. I can't say that I prefer her paintings to his, but it's close. She also worked in every other medium I can think of, including Ceramics (which I guess she's the most famous for now) and glass.

Mrs. Wolfe and my paternal grandmother were friends. I believe they played bridge together. I was never invited to those parties. There was a cluster of little old ladies in Jackson determined to bring arts and letters to our community, and they held Mildred Wolfe and Eudora Welty as proof of Mississippi's worthiness. Looking back on it now, I guess they got what they wanted.

My grandmother Campbell had some forty-five paintings by Mississippi artists; three were by Mildred Wolfe and possibly two dozen of her ceramic birds. My sister and aunt have them all now, and they're in good hands.

Signature On
The Raymond Lodge Painting

According to the signature on the Raymond Lodge landscape, I was three years old when Mrs. Wolfe finished it. My uncle Boyd never lived to see it, but he would have loved it. I cannot remember a time before this painting existed.

Before my sister's house, the Raymond lodge painting hung in the hallway of my grandparent's St Ann Street house in Bellhaven. Across from it was the doorway to my Aunt Evelyn's bedroom, which became the guest room. Visiting them, I saw it there my entire young life. A well-made painting accomplishes so many things, not the least of which invoking happy memories, which this one did for me.

I want to thank my sister, my brother, my brother-in-law, BeBe, and Mildred Wolfe for bringing all these memories back to me.

For more information about The Wolfe Studio and Wolfe Porceline Birds please visit their WEBSITE.