Tucked away in the tree-lined Woodland Hills within Jackson’s Fondren neighborhood, one particular house has sat at the bottom of a small wooded hill since the early 1950s. Famed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house in 1948 and completed it by 1954 on behalf of a Jackson oil industry worker named J. Willis Hughes, whose family lived there through the 1970s.
Originally known simply as the “Hughes House,” the building eventually came to be called “The Fountainhead,” named for the Ayn Rand novel of the same name due to rumors that Rand based the novel on Frank Lloyd Wright’s life.
After the Hughes family left the house, an architect named Robert Parker Adam purchased it and spent a number of years working to restore it before listing the property out to Crescent Sotheby’s International Realty.
The house has never had another resident since. While the United States Department of the Interior eventually entered the property into the National Registry of Historic Places by 1980, it has otherwise sat empty for decades.
The Mississippi Museum of Art in downtown Jackson recently stepped up and purchased the property from Robert Parker Adams’ wife, Sherri Adams, in the name of restoring and preserving the historic home after receiving approval from the Jackson Planning and Zoning Board and the Jackson City Council…