What's in a name? | Riddick's Folly, Suffolk

If you do something dumb, that's a folly.

If you build an expensive and unusual outdoor structure with extravagant uses in mind, like mock Gothic ruins you think would be killer for parties, your neighbors might call it a folly.

And if in 1837 you built a four-story brick Greek revival house with 20 rooms and 16 fireplaces in downtown Suffolk, people definitely sneered and called it the f-word.

That's what happened to Mills Riddick, merchant, politician, slaveholder, city father and mastermind of Riddick's Folly, a mansion that today is a historical museum on North Main Street.

Riddick built his house after a huge fire devastated Suffolk in 1837. Instead of using wood like everybody else, he rebuilt with brick. He copied an ornate style he'd seen while on business in Philadelphia. He put the kitchen inside, something unheard of in fire-prone Suffolk, and skipped the spacious veranda common in the muggy South. The front porch is as small as a Brooklyn brownstone. Nobody had seen anything like it.

"It must have been like dropping a Frank Lloyd Wright into the Victorian era," said Sue Woodward, a Suffolk historian. "Every thing about it was weird."

And so it became his folly.

After Riddick died, his son lived in the house until Union troops took over the building for offices during the Civil War. The Riddicks returned home after the war and lived there until 1967, when the house was sold to Nansemond County. In 1977, it was turned into a Suffolk museum.

Aaron Applegate, (757) 222-5555. aaron.applegate@pilotonline.com