Feature Story: Peggy Snow

Peggy Snow walks around her friend admiring her beautiful exterior: intricate brick-work, three chimneys and what appears to be a water well attached to the back porch – very unusual.

Snow’s friend is a stately old farmhouse on Franklin Road. Snow wants to make sure no one forgets its architecture.

“These buildings are like friends, I’m always looking around the corner like ‘Oh, is that friend still there?’” Snow said.

Snow looks to find the best spot to set up her “office” so she can see all the details of the house. She’s built a business painting old buildings to preserve them for posterity. She considers it time with friends.

 Nashville has gone under monumental change since Snow moved to the city in 1980 – many of her friends have been torn down and turned into parking lots, rental properties for tourists or tall and skinnies.

“With each building that goes down, there is a part of Nashville and its history that is lost. Peggy somehow captures those things in her paintings, the character of the Nashville community being lost, and a feeling for what once was and will not be anymore,” said friend Audrey Campbell.

While Nashvillians and tourists celebrate the city’s explosive growth, Snow mourns the loss of a different part of town: old Nashville.

“No matter how I might try to tell myself, I know what’s going to happen, and I still end up getting attached,” said Snow of the buildings she paints.

She began painting old structures when she was 19 at Memphis State University.

“It started with all the old shacks and buildings that are really kind of disappearing in the country. They’re kind of beginning to collapse and the wood looks silvery-blue, and the tin roofs get all rusty. I just love the vision of that, it takes on the elements and it looks a part of the Earth,” said Snow.

Her first prominent Nashville subject was the old Father Ryan High School on Elliston Place. The painting was purchased by Mark Neal soon after the building was demolished.

The demolition was heartbreaking to so many people, said Snow, and that community response pushed her down this path.

Neal met the painter like many do: while she paints.

“I was visiting a client of mine who was tearing down the old Jacksonian apartments off West End Avenue, and Peggy was across the street painting the apartments,” Neal said.

She was outside every day through rain, sleet and snow, he said.

Neal ran into Snow another time, painting a church near his office. He struck up a conversation with her about her work.

Snow brought him to her house filled with her art.

“She had probably 50 to 100 pieces of art that she painted, and they were just amazing,” Neal said. He now owns five of her works.

Snow carefully steps through the overgrown weeds and looks up at the house. She wonders how she will get all three of the home’s chimneys in her composition.

She approaches the concrete structure on the back porch, a well perhaps? Things like this are what make older buildings unique.

“Our governing body and the drive of money and the drive of making money has overshadowed our value of old architecture. The materials that the old architecture is made of are not materials that we have anymore,” said Snow.

Nashville has not done a good job of valuing and protecting the city’s old buildings, Snow said. Getting a building protected is sobering.

“It’s so often defeated by private ownership. It’s a very common story that a developer or someone will buy an old property with the intention of saving that property and then finding that it was too expensive and they tear it down,” she said.

Snow notices more unique features of the home: the limestone and its mortar work, made right here in town.

These are the things she loves about old architecture. A human element in architecture is something not seen anymore, Snow said.

“If we were to go inside the house, this would be such a beautiful old house. The doorways go out from one room to the next, where the air would circulate throughout the house,” said Snow.

She’s done surveying the home and goes to her car.

The painter’s car is like a graveyard for Nashville’s old architecture. Some painting are waiting to be sold, others barely started.

She pulls out a canvas with only a charcoal outline and a few bits of paint.

“This is the sketch of the Hermitage Café which I could not finish. It’s a very nice, very well-loved Café down on Hermitage Avenue near downtown. A beautiful red. I liked the composition, and if I had known that I was not going to be able to get back to it, I would have let it just stand as a sketch, but I was hoping to paint it,” she said.

Snow often works quickly to finish her painting, racing to get it done before the building is demolished.

She often forms relationships with the demolition workers.

“There’s been several times that the demolition crews have done their best to let me work by slowing their process, even halting it for a day,” said Snow.

Snow admires the red barn in the back yard, wondering how she will fit it into her composition. She walks to the front of the house and places herself just under the roof to avoid the rain, but not too close to disrespect the home – she is trespassing after all.

Snow pulls out her painting of Merritt Mansion in Wedgewood-Houston and shows off the relics from the site. She points out a piece of bark from a tree and a piece of ceramic that was inscribed ‘GERMANY.’

Campbell always enjoys finding where Snow included mementos from the site – a piece of gravel or a tiny stone.

In addition to capturing a small physical relic from the home, Snow’s paintings capture the nostalgia of the architecture she paints, and the regret that those things are being lost, said Campbell.

One day, the community will realize what kind of treasure old buildings are, said Snow’s friend and musical collaborator Bob Clement.

“No one’s ready to wake up to that asset we really have, which is cool architecture. I guess that money trumps other things when it comes to Metro councils and mayors and stuff, it’s poor leadership. When I think of what her paintings represent, it’s poor leadership in cities,” he said.

Snow admires the lichen on the warped, decaying porch.

“When a place becomes abandoned, it has come to really attract my eye, because I realize it is in peril to see it like this,” said Snow. “I love the old architecture, I love the bleached porch and I love the old windows, the long old windows, and I think that was a well on the back.”

The painter takes a piece of each structure with her as she moves, remembering the unique aspects of each subject.

While Nashville continues to grow, tearing down the old to make way for the new, Peggy Snow will be there, quietly mourning the loss of the city’s history.

She packs up her car, and hits the road. She has more friends to visit.