Hamilton Mask, who commissioned the Verandah House, was born April 23, 1823, in North Carolina, son of Pleasant M. Mask, a veteran of the War of 1812, and his wife, Winifred T. (Pemberton) Mask.  While still a child, his parents and his uncle, William A. Mask, purchased unimproved farmland and built “impressive homes” in Hardeman County in southwestern Tennessee; the 1840 census recorded the household of Pleasant Mask consisted of six whites and thirteen slaves. Pleasant Mask prepared his will January 10, 1847, and the estate was probated in January, 1848; Hamilton Mask was appointed executor and the will mentions the names of four daughters and another son.

On December 14, 1847, Hamilton Mask married Amanda P. Whitmore (1830-1856), whose parents had left Virginia to settle in Hardeman County, Tennessee. The 1850 census listed Hamilton Mask as a “farmer” with a wife and infant son named Edward. A second son, Henry Temple Mask, was born in 1852 or 1853 after the young family had relocated to Tishomingo County, Mississippi. In 1856, Amanda Mask died in childbirth. Of the three children born to this marriage, only Henry T. Mask lived to adulthood.

As a widower and the father of one, possibly two, young sons, Hamilton Mask needed a wife and within a year he married twenty-one-year-old Jessie O. Van Eaton on February 5, 1857. Ms. Van Eaton had been born in Ohio, but the family lived in Moulton, Alabama, at the time of her marriage. The Verandah House was built the same year, probably under the direction of William F. Turner, a carpenter born in North Carolina who had migrated to Tennessee before settling in what would become Corinth.

The Mask family lived in the house for three years before moving to Memphis in 1860 with their only child, eight-year-old Henry. (One must assume the first son, Edward, had died in childhood and the infant born in 1856 had not survived.)

The two adults and the child were not the only people in the household, however. The 1857 tax assessment in Corinth listed four male slaves under the age of 60 belonging to Hamilton Mask. Two years later, in October, 1859, Mask listed his six slaves as collateral to secure debts he had accrued. At that time, the list included a mulatto man age 32, two mulatto women age 28, a Negro woman (no age given), and two Negro boys ages 5 and 10. The following year, 1860, the slave schedule listed four slaves; a mulatto male age 78, two mulatto females ages 25, and a 17-year-old mulatto male who occupied the three dwellings on the property. While there is no hint as to what work these people provided, it might be surmised that the men were part of Mask’s surveying operation or worked on his property while the women performed household chores such as cooking, housekeeping, and keeping track of a lively young boy, Henry.

Hamilton Mask and his family moved to Memphis in 1860, selling Verandah House. He may have served in the army of the Confederacy but what regiment is unknown. The family returned to Corinth in 1865 and three years later Hamilton Mask’s wife, Jessie Mask, acquired a house on the southeast corner of Fillmore and Bunch not far from Verandah House. The war years produced severe financial strain and in 1868 Mask filed for bankruptcy owing creditors approximately $24,500 ($414,000 in today’s dollars). Regardless of his financial difficulties, Hamilton Mask was appointed mayor of Corinth, serving 1865-1869, and then was elected as mayor from 1870-1874.

Legal troubles continued to plague Mask and in 1875 he sold the house in Corinth and moved to Coahoma County, Mississippi, where Jessie Van Eaton Mask’s parents and her brother, Frank Van Eaton, had acquired a large amount of land.  Mask was elected to the Board of County Supervisors and farmed, especially after his wife inherited a portion of the Van Eaton’s land in 1877. His health began to fail and he died April 22, 1886, one day short of his 64^thbirthday.  Jessie Van Eaton Mask was made of sterner stuff, living to the age of eighty-four. Having no children of her own, she lived the last ten years of her life in Lyon, Mississippi, with her stepson, Henry T. Mask, and his business partner, Charles R. Stephenson, who were her sole heirs. She died June 13, 1919. When Henry Mask died in late December, 1925, he was buried next to his stepmother. Charles Stephenson joined them in 1945. 

[This information regarding the Mask family is taken from Stephanie L. Sandy, Development of Corinth, Mississippi: Biography for Hamilton Mask, Corinth, Mississippi, a monograph originally published February 21, 2014.]