Pelham Reaches Fifty

       Most of us probably associate Pelham only with recent history. After all, Pelham was not incorporated until 1964, when the population was 654.Most of the town's growth has taken place since the 1980s. In July the city celebrated the 50th anniversary of that incorporation. Yet a community named Pelham has existed in this location since the early 1870s; a post office was established here in 1873.

Pelham's history actually goes back to the very early days of the state. Alabama achieved statehood in December, 1819. Shelby County was created in the Alabama Territory in February, 1818; the county is named for Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky and a hero of the Battle of King's Mountain during the Revolutionary War.

In 1820 a county courthouse was built by Thomas A. Rogers, Alabama's first Secretary of State, in a community known as Shelbyville. Six years later a permanent county seat was established in the southern part of the county at Columbiana. Shelbyville remained tiny, and after the Civil War--some accounts say in 1867--the town was renamed after Confederate hero Major John Pelham.

John Pelham in his uniform at West Point, 1858
Source: Wikipedia

John Pelham was born in what is now Calhoun County on September 7, 1838. He was the son of Atkinson Pelham, a physician, and Martha McGehee Pelham. His siblings included brothers William and Peter. A fictionalized account of the family, Growing Up in Alabama, was published by Mary Elizabeth Sergent in 1988.

As the Civil War loomed, Pelham resigned from West Point just weeks before his graduation. He distinguished himself with an artillery battery at the first Battle of Manassas, and J.E.B. Stuart appointed him captain of a six-gun battery with his cavalry. Pelham participated in some 60 battles under Stuart, and his contribution to the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg led Robert E. Lee to dub him "the Gallant Pelham." He died at the age of 24 on March 17, 1863, at the Battle of Kelly's Ford in Virginia. Pelham is buried in the Jacksonville City Cemetery, where a large monument marks his grave. The city of Pelham held a Major John Pelham Day in March 1988.

Our Shelby County Pelham is not the only location with that name in Alabama; there is a Pelham Heights in Calhoun County and another Pelham in Choctaw County. Communities named Pelham exist in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, New Hampshire, New York and Massachusetts. There are also numerous streets by this name around the country. Some of these are probably not named after a Confederate cavalry hero!

Very little history of our Pelham has been gathered for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At least five physicians practiced here during this period. Eli Forest Denson, a Vanderbilt graduate, arrived around 1879. Another Vanderbilt alumni, Joseph Madison Johnson, and William R. King Johnson [perhaps a brother] who graduated from the Atlanta Medical College, set up practices in the early 1880s. Andrew Wailes Horton of the Medical College of Alabama began practice in Pelham around 1901. How long these doctors remained in the area is not yet known. Buried in the Pelham Community Cemetery, which was established in the early 1840s, is John Payne, M.D., who died in 1901. The cemetery is located at the intersection of County Highway 105 (Bearden Road) and Industrial Park Road; the oldest marked grave is that of Louisa T. Betty Cross.

The Alabama State Gazetteer and Business Directory 1887-1888 lists a number of the businesses and professional men in Pelham, which had about 250 residents then. Included were a postmaster, constable, hotel owner, dentist, shoemaker, blacksmith, four general store owners, a lumber yard, three ministers, and one physician, William Rufus K. Johnson.

At least one of the merchants, W.S. Cross, was profiled in depth in the Memorial Record of Alabama published in 1893. A Shelby County native, Cross started a small store in Pelham in 1881. He did well enough to buy and sell at a profit some Birmingham real estate and then bought more property in Pelham, "which he has improved with dwellings and store houses." In 1880 Cross had married Ann McWhorter, a Butler County native; by 1893, the couple had five children.

Pelham appears on Joseph Squire's "Map of Helena and Environs" from 1885 and on a 1937 Shelby County map issued by the state highway department. What is probably the city's oldest building, the Pelham Railroad Depot, dates from about 1900. The

structure was moved from its original location behind City Hall to the city park in August 1988 and renovated.

From the 1930s until at least the 1950s Shelby County Voting District 17 was known as the Pelham District. Development of Oak Mountain State Park began in 1935 under the direction of engineer W.J. Connell using the labor of 180 young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Many of these youths were from New York City and getting their first taste of rural America.

Several schools have been located in Pelham. Rutherford High School opened in the 1870s. This structure, which had one large room and a smaller music room, was destroyed by a storm in 1909. The Pelham School, a two-story wooden building, opened sometime after and was replaced in 1936 by a one-story school with four rooms, an auditorium, and a lunch room. Located on the site of the current City Hall, the building was used as the city's offices after Valley Elementary opened in 1964 until it was torn down in 1973. Pelham High School opened in 1974.

Efforts to organize churches in Pelham began before 1900. A Methodist church, located for over a century at the southwest corner of U.S. Highway 31 and Shelby Co. 52, was dedicated in November, 1898, and also served Baptists and Presbyterians. A Baptist church formed in 1908, but became inactive the following year. Several other attempts to organize a Baptist church continued into the 1930s; the first full-time pastor, Ronnie Euler, was appointed in 1966.

On July 7, 1964, an incorporation election was held at the Pelham School. Many residents were afraid the nearby city of Alabaster would try to annex the area. Over ninety percent of eligible voters, one hundred and forty-one people, voted; one hundred and twenty-one were in favor of incorporation. Three days later the "Order of Incorporation" was filed at the Probate Office, and Pelham's legal existence began. The incorporated area included the Pelham and Keystone communities, Fungo Hollow, and part of the Helena rural route. In the fifty years since that vote, Pelham has had only five mayors: Paul Yeager, Sr. [1964-1976], Alton Burk Dunaway [1976-1984], Bobby Hayes 1984-2008], Don Murphy [2008-2012], and the current mayor and former city Fire Chief, Gary Waters.

In December, 1964, Pelham hired its first policeman, L.A. "Buddy" Wilkinson, who was paid $100 a month. Initially the fire department was a volunteer one; the first Chief was Roy Jowers, followed by O.C. Ray, who served from 1966 to 1977. In March of that year W.A. Bryars became the city's first professional Chief. The first city clerk, Willie Mae Dennis, held the post until her retirement in 1984; during her first few years she worked part-time for the city. The U.S. Census Bureau population estimate for the city on July 1, 2012, was 22,012 individuals.

Read More About It 

Hassler, William W. Colonel John Pelham. 1960 

Heritage of Shelby County, Alabama. 1999 

Mercer, Philip. The Life of the Gallant Pelham. 1995 

Milham, Charles G. Gallant Pelham: American Extraordinary. 1985 [1959] 

Roberts, Barbara. "History of Pelham" [unpublished; available in the Pelham Public Library] 

Schatz, Clark T. "The Birth and Growth of a Town" [unpublished; covers 1964-1979; available in the Pelham Public Library] 

Seales, Bobby Joe. History of Pelham: The Gateway of Opportunity.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~alshelby/Pelham.html

Links to Pelham Articles on this blog

Pondering an Alabama Map (2): Pelham in 1926

Pondering an Alabama Map (1): Pelham in 1917

Keystone Then and Now

Pelham Schools Have a Long History

Pelham Railroad Depot Then and Now

Pelham's Oak Mountain State Park 

A Story in Stone: John Payne, M.D. [1860-1901]

Pelham in the 1880s

A version of this article appeared in the Pelham City News July 2014.

Birmingham's National Dope Company & Other Early Soft Drink Bottlers

In the first half of the 20^th century Birmingham was home to several soft drink companies bottling such exotic drinks as Gay-Ola, Rye-Ola and Wiseola. At his Kola Wars site noted below, researcher Dennis Smith declares, “No city in the country had the number of brand name and proprietary soft drinks that were produced in the city of Birmingham prior to 1920.” With the help of the BhamWiki and Antique-Bottles.net web sites, I’d like to bring together some information on a few of these companies and their products.

Bottled drinks appeared in Alabama soon after the Civil War.  “Red Sulphur Water” was sold in blue bottles in the 1870s by the Blount Springs Natural Sulphur Water Bottling Company. The firm operated at the mineral springs resort north of Birmingham; the product was sold to guests and passengers on the resort’s trains. Bottles were also shipped elsewhere in Alabama and into Tennessee as well.

An early Birmingham soft drink drink formula, Celery-Cola, was developed by businessman James Mayfield in 1887. Beginning in the 1880s Mayfield partnered with John Pemberton, the patent medicine inventor whose products included Coca-Cola. He also worked as general manager for T.J. Eady’s real estate, banking and manufacturing businesses as well as the Wine Coca Company. Mayfield later developed oil wells in Kentucky and Tennessee and opened offices to sell drink syrup rights to bottlers all over the United States, Cuba and South America until the Great Depression killed his final efforts in that field.

                                    

In 1899 Mayfield and a partner opened J.C. Mayfield Manufacturing Company on Morris Avenue and the Celery-Cola Company operated from there until 1910. In 1906 Congress passed the first consumer legislation, the Pure Food and Drug Act, which allowed the federal government to require product labels giving ingredients and amounts. Unfortunately, Mayfield’s Celery-Cola contained high levels of caffeine and cocaine, two of the substances the government could regulate. The Pure Food and Drug Administration took Mayfield to court and won; he had to close the business. In 1911, however, he was in St. Louis operating as the Koke Company; Coca-Cola sued for trademark infringement and finally won a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1920. He continued marketing other drinks from St. Louis into the 1930s.

Another local chemist and drink entrepreneur was Jefferson J. Peek and his Peek Beverage Company.  He opened his company in 1905; his offices were in the original Watt Building downtown with a bottling operation next door.  The 1910 U.S. Census shows Peek living on 28^th Street with his wife Mary and two sons. His occupation is listed as “manufacturer Kola syrup.” Peek created such brands as Rye-Ola, Wiseola and Nervola before selling the firm in 1918. The new owners had to close the business, by then located in Southside, in 1922.

Rye-Ola bottle



 Watts Building, 20^th St.& 3^rd Avenue North, demolished 1927                       
                                 

 The National Dope Company produced and bottled soft drinks in Birmingham from 1909 to 1911. “Dope” was a slang term for carbonated soft drinks with cola syrup that seems to have been used primarily in the southern U.S. into the 1950s.

Source: Antique-Bottles.net Forum
http://www.antique-bottles.net/forum/National-Dope-Company-m131612.aspx

 Other local soft drinks in this time period included Ozo-Olo and Gay-Ola. Both drinks were among the many Coca-Cola imitators of the day. Gay-Ola was sold by J.C. Wells’ Gleeola Company, which opened on 18^th Street South in 1910. By June of the following year the company was producing 40,000 gallons of syrup a month and expanding aggressively as far as Florida, Texas and California. Lawsuits eventually won by Coca-Cola forced the company to make changes, but a version of the drink remained on the market into the 1920s. 

In 1938 local businessman A.G. Gaston founded the Brown Belle Bottling Company and created such drinks as Joe Louis Punch and Brown Bell Boogie. The firm operated until 1950, but had trouble finding sales outlets and mounting debts. Gaston finally paid those debts himself.



Many other producers and bottlers of soft drinks operated in Birmingham before World War II. The entire history of soft drinks is fascinating, and Birmingham has played an important role in that story.  

All images are from BhamWiki.com unless otherwise noted.

More Information

BhamWiki: List of Bottlers
http://www.bhamwiki.com/w/List_of_bottlers

Blount Springs Natural Sulphur Water Bottling Company
http://www.southernbottles.com/files/bountSpring.html

History & Timeline of Soft Drinks
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/a/soft_drink.htm

Smith, Dennis. Birmingham Bottlers, 1883-1983. Birmingham: privately published, 1983

Smith, Dennis I. Celery-Cola and James C. Mayfield. http://www.southernbottles.com/Pages/Mayfield/Mayfield.html

Smith, Dennis. Kola Wars: Birmingham
http://kolawars.com/blank.html

Pondering an Alabama Map (2): Pelham in 1926

Our map this time is a 1926 road map of Shelby County. I found this map in UA's Historical Maps Collection among various maps of the county.

The map was one of many official county road maps completed by the Whitson Map & Blueprint Co. of Birmingham beginning in the 1920s. The company's namesake was Bethel W. Whitson. This map was created by E.A. Turner, presumably a Whitson employee.

Whitson's company is listed in the 1945 Birmingham Yellow Pages under "Maps". Located at 108 1/2 North 21st Street, the firm's phone number was 4-2606. 

Whitson and his family appeared in the 1940 US Census living at 1061 Lakeview Crescent in the City. In addition to his wife Mabel and two daughters, Whitson's mother-in-law and brother-in-law also lived in the household. Whitson was 42 at that time. According to Bhamwiki, the surveyor and cartographer had worked at the Electric Blue Printing Company before starting his own firm. 

The portion of the map shown here includes Pelham and some surrounding towns. In addition to Pelham, we see current towns like Helena, Saginaw, Maylene and "Alabasta". Other towns such as Roebuck, Straven, Siluria, Kestone and Longview have been absorbed by subsequent growth of Pelham and others.

You can read a little more about Keystone in a previous post on this blog. Maybe I'll look into the history of some of the other places in future posts. And just when did "Alabasta" become Alabaster, anyway??

Next map up for pondering: a 1928 map showing Pelham and surrounding area. Then I'll move on to a look at official Alabama highway maps. 

A Quick Visit to Bryce Hospital

In May 2008 my wife Dianne, son Amos, daughter Becca and her husband Matt Leon attended a Shores family reunion in Tuscaloosa. Before we left town we made a trip to the Bryce Hospital campus and snapped a few photos. 

Since patients were still in residence at that time, we could not go inside and were gently urged not to take photographs, either. The temptation was simply too great at the site of this Alabama landmark so progressive when it opened in the 1850s and so notorious in recent decades.

The hospital has a fascinating history and the University of Alabama Libraries Special Collections and the Alabama Department of Archives and History have much material print and digital related to that history. For some years patients published a newspaper, The Meteor; an issue can be seen here.
Also online is "Instructions on Bringing a Patient to the Hospital" dating from the late nineteenth century. 

Now that UA owns the Bryce campus, hopefully the original buildings and cemetery will be preserved. 

Clanton's Peach Water Tower,a Luna Moth, a Turtle & a Hawk

This blog is subtitled "Random wanderings through Alabama history" and here's another of those simply random posts to go along with the Alabama Pizza Pasta shop in London and Alabama natives at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. At least this post covers material actually IN the state of Alabama and bits of history natural and man-made. 

The South has two giant peaches visible as you zoom by on the Interstate. One is the Peachoid in Gaffney, South Carolina, visible on I-85 between exists 90 and 92. This tower is 135 feet tall and holds about a million gallons of water. The Chicago Bridge and Iron Company built the structure in 1981. 

Wife Dianne and I recently visited Alabama's giant peach when we were in the Clanton area. That city's tower is 120 feet high and holds half a million gallons of water. The tower was constructed in 1992 and like its South Carolina counterpart uniquely advertises the importance of peaches in the local economy. Located just off Exit 212 on I-65, the tower was also built by the Chicago Bridge & Iron Company.

Photo by Dianne Wright

Earlier this year Kelly Kazek published an article on al.com about water towers around the state. She included many interesting ones old and new.

One day this past spring on our way out the front door we found this beautiful luna moth or acitas luna near the sidewalk. These critters can be found in eastern North America and sometimes in Canada and Mexico. They grow up to a 4.5-inch wingspan, and this one must have been close. By the time we returned to the house our visitor was gone.

Photo by Becca Leon

Life is random that way; you never know what may turn up if you keep your eyes open. I came home with brother Richard in July 2008 and found this fella crossing the front yard. I presume he wandered up from the nearby creek in our neighborhood. A couple of hours later he too was gone. These American box turtles are pretty common around here but they seldom visit our front yard.



We recently watched a hawk land briefly on our deck, walk around a bit, and then take off majestically into the woods toward the back of the lot. Needless to say I didn't get a phot of that one!

Birmingham Photo of the Day (19): Orphans Home (?), East Lake, 1908

This photo continues our series from the 1908 book Views of Birmingham. 

Interestingly, the photo is apparently misidentified in the book. According to the listing in Birmingham Public Library's Digital Collections, the structure is actually the main administration building of Howard College [now Samford University] which was in East Lake at the time. Founded in Marion in 1841, the school moved to East Lake in 1887 and then to its current location in Homewood in the 1950s.

A more extensive history of "Old Main" can be found on the BhamWiki site. The building was demolished in 1960 and an apartment complex built on the site.

I guess photographs were mis-identified even before the Internet! 

The real Orphans' Home, built originally as a private girls' school, can be seen at the BhamWiki site. 

"Save the child if you would save the state": Newsboys in Birmingham in 1922

               Serendipity can be a wonderful thing. Working on another project recently, I stumbled across an online volume of a quarterly magazine called The American Child, “A Journal of Constructive Democracy” published by the National Child Labor Committee and selling for 25 cents per copy.

               According to Wikipedia, “Edgar Gardner Murphy, an American clergyman and author, is credited with proposing the National Child Labor Committee following a conference between Murphy's Alabama Child Labor Committee, and the New York Child Labor Committee. The conference culminated on April 25, 1904 at a mass meeting held in Carnegie Hall, New York City. At the meeting, both men and women concerned with the plight of working children overwhelmingly supported the formation of the National Child Labor Committee.“

Murphy, who died in 1913, was an author and rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Montgomery; he had suggested a national organization in a pamphlet he published in February, 1904. The last decade of his life was devoted to efforts in education and social work. One of his books, Problems in the Present South, first appeared in 1904, with a second edition in 1909. The NCLC is still active today with headquarters in Manhattan. The American Child began publication in 1919 and lasted until 1967.

               Volumes 3 and 4 from the early 1920s can be found online at Google Books. In the last issue of volume 3, from February 1922, is a fascinating article by Esther Lee Rider, “Newsboys in Birmingham” [pp 315-324].  At the time, Rider was a Child Labor Inspector for the Alabama Department of Child Welfare. She studied the hours, pay and “general conduct” of 143 young men who spent two to four hours daily selling or distributing newspapers in the city. She wanted to know if that work affected their schooling “and whether street trades have a tendency to produce delinquency and low moral standards.”

               In 1922 three daily papers in the city published two to four editions each day. Morning papers rolled off the presses about 5 o’clock and the afternoon ones appeared between noon and 5 p.m. Most of the boys Rider studied, 107, were street sellers and most of them sold afternoon editions, which disrupted their schooling less. The others distributed morning or afternoon papers for some of the 150 or so men who as district carriers were responsible for getting papers to subscribers. Rider only studied boys who had “badges” under the Alabama child labor law; how many other unlicensed children were employed as newsboys is unknown.

               That law allowed children in the “street trades” to work only between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m. Alabama had passed its first child labor act in the 1886-7 session. The 1915 act prohibited boys under 12 from selling papers and under 10 from distributing them; girls under 18 were not allowed to work in any street trades at all. Boys under 14 could not work during the hours that their local public schools were in session. In her research, Rider bought papers from newsboys as early as 3 a.m. and as late as 10:30 p.m. Many of the boys admitted to her they worked past 8 p.m. if they had not yet sold all their papers.

               Rider’s article covers many other aspects of the newsboys’ working lives. She examined how long they had been on the job and how much they made. “Although one boy said he made $20.00 a week,” she wrote, “the average earnings of the 107 boys studied [who sold papers] were $6.50 a week or 93 cents daily.” Very few individuals saved any money at all. She outlines a typical daily schedule for the boys and how they spend their earnings. She looked at school attendance and grade records for all of the boys, and found “Promotion uncertain” for 72 and 24 percent of the sellers and distributors respectively. 

               Rider examined the family status of each boy, and how many engaged in such activities as smoking, gambling, truancy, using vulgar language and staying out at night “habitually.” She noted that one boy stayed out all night if he didn’t make his quota and thus avoided his father’s beating. She also describes the recreational activities and juvenile court records of the newsboys.

               Her conclusions note the poor savings rate, the inability of many boys who work to do well in school, poor home environments and the need for more wholesome recreational activities for children, which are “preventive measures against immortality and crime which often result from misdirected energy in early childhood.” Her final sentence reads, “Save the child if you would save the state.” 

              An interesting companion piece to Rider’s article is “Street Trades in Alabama” by Loraine B. Bush, published in the August 1922 issue of The American Child [pp 107-113]. Bush had presented this material at the 17^th National Conference on Child Labor and gives some background to the Rider study. Bush notes that three studies of newsboys “hours, earnings and behavior” had been conducted in 1920 in Anniston, Mobile and Montgomery. In the following year a second Mobile study and the one in Birmingham had been completed. Her article gives additional details about the lives of these “nearly 1,000 boys under 16 years of age in Alabama who take out licenses for street trades.”

               These two articles give us a fascinating snapshot of life for some boys in Birmingham and other Alabama cities in the early 1920s. I am reminded of the various portraits of marginal existence and obsolete urban jobs in England described so well by Henry Mayhew in newspaper articles in the 1840s and published in several volumes as London Labour and the London Poor. A broad national perspective on newsboys and the street trades in America can be found in Peter C. Baldwin’s In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Newsboys in Mobile in October 1914. Taken by famed photographer & sociologist Lewis Hine. Source: Library of Congress    

       

Another of Lewis Hines' newsboy photos from that 1914 Mobile visit

The U.S. Library of Congress newspaper project "Chronicling America" has a topic page devoted to newsboys here. 

This piece first appeared on the Birmingham History Center's blog in April 2012.