A 1936 Check from Marion Bank & Trust

Old checks hold a fascination for both my brother Richard and I. In going through mom and dad's house in Huntsville we've found a large batch of checks from the 1950s and 1960s Dad had saved that document payment of Cub Scout and school fees and many other landmarks of family life. Perhaps I'll do a blog post on some of those one day.

This blog post is about a different check that Richard gave me for Christmas one year. Let's take a look.

As you might expect, Wikipedia has an extensive history of check use and development. In the U.S. banks issued their own checks for many decades. The current system of routing information at the bottom did not appear until the 1960s.

What is now Marion Community Bank traces its history to 1902 when the Marion Central Bank opened. That institution was forced to close in 1933 during the Great Depression, but one year later under a new charter reopened on March 17, 1934, as the Marion Bank and Trust Company. That bank operated in the original bank building until 1972, when a new headquarters opened. After opening a number of branches in that part of the state, the bank rebranded to its current name in 2021. On this check you can see that Marion Bank and Trust Company has been stamped over the original bank name. 

So, what else can we determine from this check? Based on the date in May 1936, it was written just over two years after the bank reopened and still during the Great Depression. A nice rendering of the original bank building decorates the upper left corner. A fairly recent photo can be seen below.

The names of two men appear on the check. W.R. Hale wrote the check to "Cash" for $10.00. On the back the check is endorsed by J. V. Howell "Sr." The check has been marked as paid by a punch machine of some sort. 

So who were these men? 

I found a W.R. Hale in the 1950 U.S. census, 80 years old. He was born about 1870 in Alabama, a widower and roomer with James E. Stone and family, 1000 Clements St. in Marion. His occupation was listed as "unable to work". 

As William R. Hale he appears in the 1920 and 1930 U.S. Census records in Marion along with his wife Elizabeth and children. His occupation was listed as farmer. They were married on February 20, 1888. According to his gravestone seen below, Hale was born December 15, 1869, and died June 1, 1952. His wife had died in 1949. 

In the 1930 census I also found two men named John Valentine Howell in Marion. The elder Howell [19 February 1869-10 February 1941] was a retail merchant. His son was a physician, living with wife Marguerite and children at 319 E. Lafayette St. Gravestones for both men can also be seen below. 

Presumably Hale wrote this check to pay toward a store bill, since the endorsement signature on the back is "J.V. Howell Sr."

Lots of stories hidden in these humble objects...

Grave of William Ramus Hale [15 Dec 1869-1 June 1952] in Pisgah Cemetery, Perry County

Source: Find-A-Grave

Grave of John Valentine Howell, Sr. [19 February 1869-10 February 1941] in Marion Cemetery. His wife Eugenia died in 1960 and is also buried there.

Source: Find-A-Grave

Grave of John V. Howell, Jr., [13 September1896-20 August 1953] in Marion Cemetery. His father is buried in the same cemetery along with their wives. 

Source: Find-A-Grave

Old Marion Bank Building in April 2010

Source: Flickr

A Bandleader from Marion

Alabama has a long history of producing individuals who have contributed to one or more styles of jazz: W.C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Erskine Hawkins, Cleve Eaton, Sun Ra, Dinah Washington, Urbie Green, Nat King Cole and Eric Essex are only a few. Inductees of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame provide a much longer--although incomplete--listing. Wikipedia also has a list of jazz musicians from Alabama.

Marion native Hal Kemp is another of the state's connections to jazz. Born on March 27, 1904, he led his first band in high school and played alto saxophone and clarinet. In college at the University of North Carolina he led the Carolina Club Orchestra. That group performed in England and received unexpected publicity when the Prince of Wales performed with them. Kemp's recording career also began with this outfit on Okeh Records. The band toured Europe during summer breaks.

By 1927 Kemp had formed his own orchestra that included such singers and sidemen as Skinnay Ennis, Bunny Berigan, and John Scott Trotter, and the band soon became a popular one. During the Great Depression the Orchestra under Kemp's guidance developed a "sweet" sound that increased its popularity even more. The group performed regularly at the Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago from 1932 until 1934. Popular records included "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" and "In the Middle of a Kiss." Live touring and club performances were supplemented by frequent radio appearances. Kemp's orchestra had its limitations, but managed to overcome most of them as personnel and arrangements changed.

On December 19, 1940, Kemp was driving to an engagement in San Francisco when his car hit an oncoming truck in foggy conditions near Madera, California.  He survived but died of pneumonia two days later. The band attempted to continue without him, but soon broke up. 

James Hal Kemp was married twice. His first wife was Bessie [or Betsy] Slaughter [1932-37] and his second Martha Stevenson, with whom he had one daughter, Helen. Kemp is buried in North Carolina. 

Kemp and the Orchestra appeared in a few film shorts; some can be seen on YouTube. An extensive list of their recordings can be found here. 

This 78 rpm collection was released in 1948. 

University of North Carolina Yearbook 

Source: Ancestry.com 

Alabama Photo of the Day: Monument to a Slave

Another expedition to the digital material at the Alabama Department of Archives and History uncovered the photograph below. The description there noted, "Monument to Harry, a slave who saved several Howard College students from a fire in Marion, Perry County, Alabama; photo taken in the 1930's". Let's investigate.

To find out more, I turned to James F. Sulzby, Jr.'s two volume work, Toward a History of Samford University (1988). He discusses the fire on pages 28-33.

Samford was originally known as Howard College and incorporated by an act of the state legislature in 1841. Baptists founded the school, which opened in Marion on January 3, 1842, with nine students. 

The first official college building, a four-story brick structure opened on January 1, 1846. The first commencement was held on July 27, 1848, when seven men graduated. 

For the fall 1854 session 112 students were enrolled. Many of them lived in town, but others lived in the college building. On October 15, 1854, a fire began around midnight. The building and all property, valued at almost $20,000, was destroyed. 

A committee appointed to study the fire issued a statement on October 18. They noted that a professor, the tutor and 23 students had various injuries but all survived. One student died a few days later. The committee determined the fire started in a stairwell but could not establish a cause. 

The only immediate fatality was Henry, the college janitor and a slave owned by President Henry Talbird. He apparently awoke soon after the fire started and went through all the floors waking students. The fire prevented his return by the stairs, and Harry was forced to jump from a fourth story window. He was killed by the fall.  

Harry Talbird's funeral was held at Siloam Church. He was buried in Marion Cemetery. The marker seen in this photograph was paid for by officers and students of the college and members of the Baptist State Convention. 

The monument has a different inscription on each of its four sides; you can read them below. Also below are contemporary photographs of the monument. 

Source: Alabama Dept of Archives & History

Inscription

Harry

Servant of

H. Talbird, D.D.

President of Howard College

Who lost his life from injuries received while rousing the students at the burning of the college building on the night of Oct. 15th 1854.

Aged 23 years.

He was employed as waiter in the college, and when alarmed by the flames at midnight and warned to escape for his life replied "I must wake the boys first," and thus saved their lives at the cost of his own.

As a grateful tribute to his fidelity and to commemorate a noble act, this monument has been erected by the students of Howard College and the Alabama Baptist Convention.

A consistent member of the Baptist Church he illustrated the character of a Christian servant "Faithful even unto death."

(source: Library of Southern Literature, By Edwin Anderson Alderman, Joel Chandler Harris, Charles William Kent, pub. 1910, pg. 6463-6464, in a section of "Epitaphs and Inscriptions" in volume 14.)

Source: Find-A-Grave

Source: Find-A-Grave

Walker Evans Photographs Two Alabama Stores in 1936

In a previous post on this blog I've examined Birmingham photographs taken by Walker Evans probably in 1936. I'll be examining two more photographs in this post and additional ones in the future. Here's what I wrote about Evans in that previous post. 

Walker Evans [1903-1975] was one of the great documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Evans made three brief trips to Alabama during his career, in March and the summer of 1936 and again in 1973. The images he recorded on the 1936 visits are among the most iconic Great Depression photographs taken in the United States. 

His most famous photos were taken in Hale County that summer. In the previous year Evans had been working for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program that was part of recovery efforts during the Great Depression. Evans traveled to various places, including the South, documenting agricultural and industrial life and work. 

In summer 1936 writer James Agee accepted an assignment from Fortune magazine to write about sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee wanted Evans to accompany him, so the photographer took a leave from the federal agency. The two men spent eight weeks in the Alabama summer living primarily with three sharecropping families. The manuscript Agee delivered to Fortune was much longer than the magazine would publish; it eventually became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men published in 1941. Agee's singing prose about the daily lives of these desperately poor but proud people, and Evans' images make reading the book an unforgettable experience.    

Evans' third trip to Alabama came in 1973 when he and artist and photographer William Christenberry, an Alabama native, toured Hale County. Some of the color photographs Evans took on that trip appeared with Christenberry's in a museum exhibition "Of Time and Place" as well as the exhibit's catalog. 

These two photographs were taken on one of the trips Evans and Agee made between Birmingham and Greensboro and Hale County. The location of the first one is unknown, the second was taken in downtown Marion. 

Further comments are below. 

Evans' photo of a store between Tuscaloosa & Greensboro #Alabama in 1936. 

Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC

This store served as a billboard for all sorts of product advertisements; in fact, those ads may be holding the structure together. Coca Cola is certainly the most recognizable one today, although many will also recognize Clabber Girl, a brand of baking soda, powder and corn starch. Those products are still sold today by Hulman & Company, which also owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the sanctioning body of open wheel racing as well as the Rumford line of baking powder. 

The other products may be more mysterious. Hicks Capudine Liquid was a patent medicine manufactured in Raleigh, North Carolina. 666 was a concoction for use against the "discomforts and distress" of colds and made by the Monticello Drug Company of Jacksonville, Florida. 

Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic was developed by E. W. Grove in the late 1870's. He had a small drug business in Paris, Tennessee, when he came up with a syrup in which he could suspend particles of quinine. That substance was an effective treatment against the chills and fever of malaria, which was common in the U.S. South, and the syrup made taking it more palatable. His product was an instant success, both regionally and around the world. The British army adopted it for all their troops in areas where the disease affected them. Bristol-Myers Company bought Grove's in 1957. 

On the left side of the building under the "666" ad there seems to be one for "Dr. Brown, Chiropractor" and something else I'm unable to make out. I also wonder what those notices on the doors had to offer.

Walker Evans' 1936 photo of Thigpen's grocery & hardware store in Marion

Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC 

The store was owned and operated by Handley Gillis Thigpen, Sr. [1888-1948]. He is listed in the 1940 U.S. Census as the proprietor. He was married to Delia and 20-year old son Handley Gillis Thigpen, Jr., was living with them. During World War II he became a major in the U.S. Army Air Corps and died on May 13, 1945. 

Handley Gillis Thigpen, Sr., is buried in the Marion Cemetery. His son is also buried there. Delia died in March 1986.

Source: Find-A-Grave