Victorian Village is a short stretch of Adams Avenue in downtown Memphis where, by some combination of luck and preservation effort, several grand nineteenth-century houses survived the urban renewal that leveled much of the surrounding neighborhood. The most impressive are the Woodruff-Fontaine House (1870), an elaborate French Victorian mansion with a collection of period furnishings, and the Mallory-Neely House (1852), a Italianate villa that was occupied by the same family for over a century and preserves an unusual continuity of domestic life. Both are open for tours on specific days.
The houses give a vivid picture of what Memphis looked like when it was a booming cotton-trade city in the second half of the nineteenth century, before the yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s and 1880s killed thousands and drove many of the wealthy families out. Walking the three or four blocks of the Victorian Village district — it is genuinely compact — is best combined with a visit to the Fire Museum nearby or the Cotton Museum a few blocks west.