Porch swings, rocking chairs, and sofas provide plenty of conversation groupings, and a cozy hammock is the vied-for spot for naps on lazy afternoons. In temperate weather, which is most of the year in our climate, everyone can enjoy the grand and inviting screened porch that wraps three sides of the first floor.
BRANTLEY SNIPES LANDSCAPE ARCH PLUS
Now two downstairs bedrooms, plus a spacious suite of bunkrooms upstairs, and plenty of open living space can handle any number of family and friends who happen to be in residence for weekend or holiday fun. The new “old” cabin retains the rustic charm of its humble predecessor and lost nothing in translation except the inconveniences (and the mice). They began playing with ideas and came up with a rough plan that they drew on a paper napkin one night over dinner with their friend and neighbor, architect Celeste Sanders. So they decided to tear the whole thing down and rebuild, using the existing footprint. from MSU and recently retired from his job there as a cotton researcher, was of the opinion that the old place wasn’t sound underneath. “Something,” in her mind, was perhaps a wing added with more sleeping space and a new bathroom with a tub. “We had daughters there with college friends, a friend with a new baby, and two uninvited flying squirrels in the cabin,” she says. “We say we raised the city mouse and the country mouse,” says Peggy of their girls, both Auburn grads like their parents.ĭuring the New Year holiday of 2010, things arrived at a bit of a crisis point. Brantley, who is now a landscape architect and Main Street Director in Greenwood, is an enthusiastic bow hunter, and Maggie loves to fly fish on her breaks from her job in D.C. The girls grew up loving time spent with their dad out in nature. “You had to go in there and turn it up real loud.” “And we could only use it September through April it was just too hot in the summer, and the wasps won the ongoing battle.” It only had two bedrooms, and smack in the middle was a crude “privy.” “For privacy, we used the girls’ old boom box, which fit perfectly atop the toilet,” she laughs.
It had come fully stocked and furnished, with “lots of Fiestaware and vintage quilts and also lots of wasps and mice,” recalls Peggy wryly. But soon the original cypress cabin (which Peggy describes succinctly as “rundown,” with no insulation and a beat-up tin roof) proved not quite satisfactory. Just an hour and twenty minutes from their weekday home in Greenville, MeadowBrake soon proved to be the perfect getaway for the Snipeses and their two young daughters, Brantley and Maggie. Four ponds, two of which they expanded and stocked with bass, bream, and catfish, complete the property. Along the way, they have acquired extra contiguous acreage, bringing the total to three hundred, with still more leased for hunting. “It’s a combination of my maiden name, Meadows, and a reference to a favorite boyhood hunting spot of my husband’s, Canebrake, in Dixons Mills, Alabama,” explains Peggy. They named their woodland idyll MeadowBrake. They found just what they had in mind in 1997, when they came upon one hundred acres of lush forestland in the Black Hawk area of Carroll County, complete with a rustic cabin. They will tell you that the answer is, “after looking long and hard.” They knew what they wanted, and it was elusive: deep woods with the mix of pines, oaks, redbuds, and dogwoods they recalled from their native Georgia and Alabama.
“How did you ever find this place?” is the first question visitors often ask, after they make the long drive deep into the woods and arrive at Peggy and Charles Ed Snipes’s country cabin. Photography by Austin Britt Whether spent hunting, fishing, hiking, entertaining, or just kicking back from the busy week before, weekends at MeadowBrake are rich with memories in the making.
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