Birmingham Photos (85): St. Mary's on the Highlands

In September 2022 Dianne and I were in downtown Birmingham for a doctor's appointment at UAB and a visit to one of our favorite eating places, the Original Pancake House at Five Points South. I found a parking spot around the block on 12th Avenue South in front of St. Mary's on the Highlands Episcopal Church. Before walking down to meet Dianne for brunch, I snapped a few photos of this historic structure. 

As seen in the photo below, the church cornerstone was laid 13 August 1891. Another photo shows the cover of a centennial history published in 1987. Two postcards created early in the church's history are also included. 

This history begins with the founding of the parish in 1887 and was published in 1987. 

These postcards are from the Alabama Dept of Archives and History digital collections here and here. 

The Original Pancake House has been located in the Munger Building since 2000.  The chain has locations in a number of states; the one at Five Points is the only franchise in Alabama. The first location opened in Portland, Oregon, in 1953. I highly recommend a visit. 

Birmingham Photo of the Day (60): Hormel Meat Packing Plant

Wander around Alabama Mosaic, and you never know what you may find. Case in point is the photograph below, taken by Oscar V. Hunt [1881-1962] during his long, illustrious career in Birmingham. 

Whenever I find old photos of buildings, I like to see if the place still exists and if so what it's current use is. This photograph is pretty interesting just for the neat cars, which I guess would indicate sometime in the 1930's. The place on 14th Street North was a Hormel meat packing plant then; note the missing "m" in the sign. I wonder if the building was constructed for the plant or adapted for it.

As you'll see in the more recent photograph below and the Google Earth extract, the building still exists. A United Methodist ministry for the homeless, Church of the Reconciler, currently operates there. The building looks very nice, but has really not changed much over the decades.

Four photographs taken inside the Hormel plant in Montgomery in the 1950's are available here. You can learn more about Hormel here; the company has operated for more than 125 years. A photo of founder George A. Hormel is also below, along with a link to more about him.

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

The building is now used by the Church of the Reconciler.

Source

Google Earth view of the building today.

George A. Hormel [1860-1946]

Source

Once a Baptist Church, Now a Fabric Store

I worked at UAB from 1983 through 2015 and often left campus going down University Boulevard and then Green Springs Highway [Alabama State Highway 149] to enter I-65. Thus I passed this building, on the right just before the U.S. Army Reserve location, many, many times. Recently I decided to investigate.

The structure, obviously built as a church, has been home to King Cotton Fabrics since 1993. Janet and Bill Haas had opened The Cloth Patch in Tuscaloosa in 1968 and then expanded to this location. You can see interior photos here. There is also a Montgomery shop; the Tuscaloosa shop is no longer open. 

The structure has a Jefferson County Historical Commission sign noting the building's original use as Green Springs Baptist Church. I presume the two dates given are the congregation's organization and then construction of this building in 1905. The interior retains the original hardwood floors. A couple of other buildings are located on the property to the right in this photo, but I have no idea about their construction. 

Below the recent photos is a 1949 newspaper article about the church and the city's right of way on Green Springs Highway. Initially paved in the 1920's, Green Springs was partially rerouted and became a divided highway in the mid-1940's. The building has been changed very little since then. The article notes that the church had recently built a basement and would like to make an addition onto the back of the church. 

I have so far been unable to find any more information about the church. Two large histories of Baptists in Alabama, A. Hamilton Reid's Baptists in Alabama [1967] and Wayne Flynt's Alabama Baptists [1998] do not mention it.

Perhaps one day I'll stop by again and make some inquiries about further details. History just pops up all over the place, doesn't it? 

Source: Birmingham Public Library

Birmingham Photos of the Day (29): Three Churches in 1908

I'm continuing to draw photographs from the wonderful 1908 publication Views of Birmingham. 

The top photo is the "Baptist Church", perhaps the one built of Bedford Stone and dedicated on Easter Sunday in 1905. If so, it is the First Baptist Church of Birmingham now located on Lakeshore Drive in Homewood. The property was sold to AmSouth Bank in the 1980s. The Encyclopedia of Alabama has an entry on Southern Baptists in Alabama.

The Methodist building still stands and is now the First United Methodist Church of Birmingham. More information on the building is available on the BhamWiki site and on Methodism in Alabama at the Encyclopedia of Alabama. 

The Episcopal church also still stands and is now known as St. Mary's-on-the-Highlands Episcopal Church. The congregation was organized in 1887. An EOA entry on the history of the Episcopal Church in the state is available here.   

What's in those Old Birmingham Directories, Anyway?

If they survive, all sorts of ephemeral materials from the past can be of interest to historians, genealogists, entrepreneurs, and even the rest of us. Whether its pulp magazines, baseball cards, advertising flyers or directories of all types, these products can tell us something about the people who produced and used them, are listed in them and the time in which they were created.

Three such items related to Birmingham I’d like to examine in this post:  Fred W. Green’s The Birmingham Church Directory published by the Dispatch Stationary Company in 1896;  R.W A. Wilda’s  Birmingham, Alabama: Facts Worth Knowing published by the Caldwell Printing Company in September, 1889; and the 1920 telephone yellow pages for the city. The church directory and the telephone book were found online at Birmingham Public Library’s Digital Collections. The Wilda pamphlet came from the Library of Congress via Google Books.

The church directory is 80 pages long and covers various Christian denominations around the city: Baptist, Christian, Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist and the largest number, Presbyterians. One Hebrew congregation is also given. Near the end is a listing of the sixteen church locations. The listings include histories of the churches and current members. South Side Baptist, for instance, has over seven two-column pages of members.

Wilda, a native of Germany, was co-owner of a real estate firm; and his booklet is one of many issued in the city’s early days to attract investment. He includes information on Birmingham streets, water works, sewers, schools, street car lines, banks, main industries and railroads. Information on black institutions in categories such as churches and schools is included. A listing of “Buildings” street by street is useful to us in establishing what existed at the time of publication. For instance, we learn that the Caldwell Hotel was located on the corner of First Avenue and 22^nd Street.

The telephone yellow pages are a veritable snapshot of the city in 1920. The 44 pages offer categories for everything from Abstractors to X-Ray Supplies. In between are numerous doctors, lawyers, produce merchants and over two-and-a-half pages of grocers. Thirteen theaters are listed; the Lyric is the only one still surviving. Only one power company is listed; you guessed it, Alabama Power Company. The directory also includes such categories as Bath Houses, Billiard Halls and something called Ladies Toggery—as in clothing.

A fascinating aspect of the 1920 yellow pages is the lack of segregation, as the listing for “Doctors” demonstrates. Scattered among the mostly white ones are some of the city’s early black physicians.  Arthur McKinnon Brown, Logwood Ulysses Goin and Ulysses Grant Mason apparently had the same office at 310 North 18^th Street at this time. Brown and Goin had the same phone number, Main 503, but Mason’s was Main 2. Also listed is an early female physician, Annie M. Robinson. Although several women had practiced medicine in Birmingham in the 1890s and very early 20^th century, she may have been the only one in 1920.

Near the end of the telephone directory is a table giving “Long Distance Rates from Birmingham.” Most of the cities listed are in Alabama, but a few such as Washington, D.C., and Pensacola are included for comparison. The table notes that rates for over 70,000 locations are available from the long distance operator. Two basic types of calls were station-to-station, which meant the caller would talk with anyone who answered, or person-to-person.  Such calls to Hartselle, for instance, would cost 50 cents and 60 cents respectively for the “initial period”, which the table does not define.  

Publication of the two directories was supported by advertising from many local merchants scattered across lots of pages. Southside grocer J.E. Minter placed a large ad just after the title page in the church directory. Bodeker’s National Detective Agency had a full page ad in the telephone directory, which tells us that their main office in Alabama was located in the Brown-Marx building and branch offices in the state in Mobile and Montgomery. The Wilda pamphlet is “Compliments of the Bankers of Birmingham.”

These publications offer us the names of numerous individuals and their relationships with businesses and institutions. The advertisements, tables, and lists tell us much about the way life was lived in the city at the moment of publication. We can look at them now with a sense of wonder at not only how much has changed, but how much remains the same all these decades later. 

       

This piece originally appeared on the DiscoverBirmingham.org site in December 2013.