Residents of the Pink Palace Mansion

Clarence Saunders never lived in his pink Georgia marble mansion. In fact, he went bankrupt while the mansion was being built, and the unfinished building was given to the City of Memphis in 1926. Saunders never lived in the mansion, but over the museum’s history a couple of people have called the mansion—at least a few rooms of it—home.

The first was Julia Cummins, the original superintendent of the Memphis Museum of Natural History and Industrial Arts from 1929-1950. Ms. Cummins did not particularly like children and felt that the museum should be like a library. She had museum porters carry “no talking” signs. However, she did have a parrot. While he was painting the murals in the lobby in 1934 (oral history, 1984), artist Burton Callicott noted that the bird “would talk and make noises and just reverberate over the whole lobby.”

The second resident was Mrs. Ruth Bush…