The Alabama Writer Who Died in Apalachicola

OK, here's another one of those "let's figure out an Alabama connection and show some pretty pictures" posts. 

For a number of years my family has been visiting the wonderful little Florida panhandle port of Apalachicola (Apalach to the cognoscenti) and staying on nearby St. George Island. The town is full of fun shops, art galleries and even TWO bookstores as well as working shrimp, oyster and fishing boats. St George Island is half houses and half state park; the whole area is blessedly free of the numerous high rises and overbearing crowds that have ruined the traditional Red Neck Riviera from Gulf Shores to Panama City. 

Recently I was reading about Marie Layet Sheip, an Alabama author who died in Apalachicola in April 1937. In 1930, under the name Marie Stanley she published one novel, Gulf Stream, which was reprinted in 1993 by the University of Alabama Press. According to Sharon Deck's entry on Sheip in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, at the time of her death Sheip left the manuscript for another novel, "Penhazard," which her publisher had rejected.

Sheip was born in Mobile in April 1885 into a prominent city family. Orphaned when young, she lived with her maternal grandmother who was a close friend of local bestselling novelist Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. When her grandmother died, she lived with relatives in Ohio and New Jersey and studied art with William Merritt Chase before she returned to her native city at age 24. She opened an art studio and as Marie Layet wrote scripts for at least six short silent films.


In 1917 she married Stanley Sheip, member of another wealthy Mobile family. They lived on a 17-acre estate in the Spring Hill area where Marie became active in local theater and wrote poems and short stories. In the late 1920s the couple moved to Apalachicola so that Stanley Sheip could manage a sawmill owned by his family. They are listed in the 1930 U.S. census as living at 127 Bay Avenue; the house survives and can be seen below.

Sheip began writing Gulf Stream after the couple moved to Apalachicola. The novel is set in a barely-disguised Mobile and features interracial relationships and marriage. The novel received generally positive national reviews, but local blacks objected to a white author writing about their Sand Town section of Spring Hill and including much dialect. John Sledge, who wrote about books for the Mobile Press-Register for many years, published an appreciation of the novel in 2009. He called it "one of the most astonishing pieces of fiction ever set here [in Mobile]--a complex, textured and fundamentally unsettling tale."

According to a "Florida, Deaths, 1877-1939" database available at the FamilySearch genealogy site, Sheip died on April 9, 1937, and was buried the next day in Mobile. Her occupation was listed as "Housewife."

The house at 127 Bay Avenue

A street scene in Apalachicola featuring the Owl Cafe

A former ships' chandlery offers a variety of shopping

A view of the beach at the state park on St. George Island

On our last visit to the park we got to watch some mullet fishermen...

...and later I got to eat a waffle cone at the Old Time Soda Fountain in Apalachicola

We also visited Apalachicola's brewery, open about a year...

...and had some glasses full of very good beer.

One of the great places on St. George Island is Eddy Teach's

Birmingham Photo of the Day (23): New Idea Barber Shop in 1937

This photograph shows the front window of the New Idea Barber Shop in February 1937. Prominently displayed is a poster for the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus featuring the Durbar of Delhi, "Most Magnificent Spectacle in History." That part of the show seems to be an adaptation of the Delhi Durbar, an Indian celebration of the coronation of British kings and queens held in 1877, 1903, and 1911. Certainly a good excuse to bring out more elephants. 

"Join John Lewis C-I-O Now" is a reference to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a federation of labor groups. Proposed by John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America, the CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor in 1955 to form the AFl-CIO. 

Also to be seen in the photo is the reflection of what may be a customer's automobile. 

I have been unable to locate any information about this business, either via a Google search or the Birmingham Yellow Pages for 1920 and 1945 available via the Internet Archive. Perhaps it only operated for a few years; after all, 1937 was deep in the Great Depression.

The photograph was taken by Arthur Rothstein, one of numerous men and women hired by the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration to document rural America during the Depression. Rothstein took photographs in various places in Alabama, but his best known are the ones he took at Gee's Bend in Wilcox County in early 1937. Eleven of Rothstein's photos were used in a New York Times Magazine article about that place published on August 22, 1937. The article was written by John Temple Graves II, a columnist for the Birmingham Age-Herald who during World War II wrote the classic book The Fighting South.  

A web site devoted to Rothstein is here. Almost 8000 of his photographs can be found here. 

What's in Cotaco? And What Does it Mean?

Recently I posted an item on the small town of Somerville in Morgan County and its historic court house. On that same stretch of Alabama Highway 36 is another small community named Cotaco. Going west on Alabama 36 just past the Valhermosso Springs post office is a small green "Cotaco" sign that marks a boundary of the unincorporated area. I don't think there is a similar sign coming east.

As seen in the photos below, some businesses and a church include "Cotaco" in their names. Off Alabama 36, down Cotaco School Road, is the Cotaco School; scroll down to the bottom of the website "About" page for the "Legend of Cotaco School." Also in the area is Cotaco-Florette Road and Cotaco Creek, which begins in Marshall County and flows into the Tennessee River. Way over in Decatur there is even the Cotaco Opera House, apparently the first opera house constructed in Alabama. 

William A. Read's Indian Place Names in Alabama [1937] notes that a Cherokee village probably existed in the area and that "Cotaco" is perhaps a corruption of a Cherokee word for swamp or thicket. The Alabama Territorial legislature in 1818 named what is now Morgan County as Cotaco County; the name was changed in 1821.  

I checked some Alabama highway maps from the 1920s until the present and none had Cotaco marked. Yet small places can have much larger resonances through Alabama history.

UPDATE 4 March 2023

I've recently come across Paul Huggins' article, "This old house--for sale. Man prepares to leave 1st courthouse" published in the Decatur Daily 1 November 2004. The article profiles Rick McLemore, who restored what is described as "the oldest structure in Morgan County", had lived in it for a number of years and plans to sell it. The building was originally a tavern and inn known as Vaughn's Store constructed between 1812 and 1816 when the county was known as Cotaco. Originally on the Cotaco-Florette Road, McLemore had it moved two miles to 72 Ryan Road in Cotaco. The building apparently served as the courthouse during Alabama's territorial and early statehood periods until that wooden courthouse was constructed in 1825. Huggins notes, "It's note only the oldest inhabitable structure in the county, it's the oldest standing courthouse in Alabama". 

This business is no longer operating, but the church and grocery below definitely are. 

One of the brews from Cross-Eyed Owl Brewing in Decatur

Silent Filmmaking in the Birmingham Area, Part 5: Homegrown Silents

Parts 1-4 of this series covered silent films made in the Birmingham area by producers from outside the state. This posting covers local efforts in the city to make silent films. 

Please note that all of these items are identified on the Birmingham Public Library's Digital Collections site as being published in the Birmingham News and I have so designated them here. However, internal evidence in at least two of these items indicates publication in the Birmingham Post or Post-Herald. 

This article about a "home motion picture" appeared in the Birmingham News in the April 28, 1925, edition.

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

According to the above article, "Things You Ought to Know about Birmingham" would be showing at the Trianon Theater the first week of May, 1925. The Trianon was located on 2nd Avenue North and had opened in 1913 as probably one of Birmingham's first movie theaters. I presume the "Imperial Film Comany" is not the same firm by that name as the one that became the largest in India in the 1920s and 1930s, but so far I've found nothing else about it. As best I can determine, the "2,000 feet" length of the film would have run under 20 minutes if shot in 35mm.

The article below appeared in the Birmingham News on February 12, 1928. The caption reads:

Here are the four principles in "The Love Beat," a Birmingham-written movie that is being produced by The Post and the Alabama theater with local characters. In the upper left hand corner is Miss Leatlha Martin, who plays the part of "Sally;" center, Olen Deitz, "Jimmie," a Post reporter; upper right, Miss Myrtle Burgess, "Johanna." In the lower center is Guy McNaron, who plays "Steve," another Post reporter and husband of "Sally." The other lower scenes were made when the party was on location at Mountain Brook estates on the road in front of the home of Warner S. Watkins, local broker.


Some quick research has produced nothing about these individuals, so deeper digging will be required.

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

The next appeared in the Birmingham News a few months later on August 4, 1928. 

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

Another item on an individual film appeared in the Birmingham News on July 14, 1929. This production was a product of the group noted in the article above, the "Birmingham Amateur Movie Association". That group also produced another film in 1929, "What Price Pearls."

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

I hope to do some research in the future to shed further light on these individuals and films. Whether any of these films survive is unknown at this time. None of them appear in the Internet Movie Database, but that resource is known to be weak in information about silent and early sound films.

Birmingham Photo of the Day (22): The Hillman Hospital Annex Cornerstone

Often we walk by history every day and never notice. Recently I was waiting on the bus to take me to my car in the UAB remote parking lot and sat down on a bench. I was facing what is now called the New Hillman Building on 20th Street South. The Annex, actually between Old [1902] and New [1928] Hillmans, was opened in 1913. Here's what I saw on the corner of that building near its entrance:





This plaque for the Hillman Hospital Annex lists the agencies and men prominently involved in the structure. By 1907 the charitable founders & owners of Hillman Hospital, the Board of Lady Managers, transfered it to the Jefferson County Board of Revenue. The individuals were prominent in their day. Dr. Charles Whelan had been elected physician for the city of Birmingham in 1899. Dr. Edgar Poe Hogan published medical articles and served as part-time Superintendent of the hospital from 1910 until 1930. He also participated in the Spanish-American War and served in the Alabama legislature. He died in 1965. H.B. Wheelock had worked as architect on the original Hillman building.

The cornerstone plaque for the original Hillman Hospital building is below, taken from the BhamWiki site. As that article notes, Hillman Hospital originally opened on the city's Southside in 1888 as the Hospital of United Charity. Local businessman Thomas Hillman made a donation to rebuild the hospital after a fire and it was named for him when they new structure opened at its current location. All the names listed on this plaque except for the architect and contractor are women, the wives of local businessmen. That group had begun organizing for a charity hospital as the Daughters of United Charity in 1886.



A photo of the two Hillman buildings in 1929 and some history of the hospital and how it became a part of UAB can be found in one of my earlier blog posts. More about Hillman Hospital can be found on the BhamWiki site.

Mickey Rooney's Connections to Birmingham

On April 6, 2014, legendary actor Mickey Rooney died at age 93 after eight decades performing in films, television, stage, radio and vaudeville. During that career he made over 300 films and was the top box office draw in 1939. He also famously married eight times---including the first time to another legendary star, Ava Gardner---and had nine children. His second wife and first two children bring us to Rooney's Birmingham connections.

Rooney attended the 1944 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City; a runner up in that contest was Betty Jane Phillips from Birmingham, Alabama, who was Miss Birmingham that year. Rooney took notice and he and Phillips dated while he went through basic training in Alabama. Later that year, in a house off Highland Avenue in Birmingham, the two were married.

The union produced two children, Mickey Rooney, Jr. and Tim Rooney. Both sons appeared on the original Mickey Mouse Club television show and made a few other film and television appearances. Mickey Jr. currently owns an entertainment production company and has an evangelical ministry in California. Younger brother Tim died of a muscle disease in 2006. Both sons were born in Birmingham.

Betty Jane and Mickey were divorced in 1949. The following year she married Buddy Baker, a composer at Disney. They eventually divorced as well. Her third husband was jazz guitarist Barney Kessel; they divorced in 1980. She died in 2002.

The former Betty Jane Phillips was known as B.J. Baker throughout most of her life. She had begun singing in Birmingham, where she had her own radio show at age 14. Over the years she sang with many big bands and appeared on various television variety shows. She also provided backup vocals for artists ranging from Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra to Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin and the Righteous Brothers.



Mickey Rooney in a 1945 publicity still

Betty Jane Phillips Baker in the 1940s

 The happy couple in 1944

Mickey Rooney, Jr., in a photo taken from a 1978 album cover

Tim Rooney in a 1962 publicity shot

All photos are taken from either the BhamWiki or Wikipedia sites.

Once Shelbyville, A.T. & Now Pelham

Near Pelham City Hall stands a historical marker that includes the following text: “Near this site stood Shelbyville, A.T., first county seat of Shelby County; named for Isaac Shelby, governor of Tennessee. Shelby County was established February 7, 1818 by an act of the Alabama Territorial Legislature.”  Yes, the first seat of county government was located where Pelham is now. And yes, the community and the county existed before Alabama became a state.

Congress created the Alabama Territory in March 1817 from the eastern half of the Mississippi Territory, which dated from 1798. In the 1810 census what became the “A.T.” seven years later had around 9, 000 people. By 1820, just after Alabama was granted statehood in December 1819, the population had swelled to almost 128,000. In 1826 a town on the other end of the county, Columbia, was renamed Columbiana and has been the county seat ever since. Shelbyville remained a tiny town for over 150 years even after changing its name to Pelham in the 1870s.

As the marker also notes, an orphan’s court was held in what is now Pelham just two months after the county was created. A private home served as the first courthouse. Even in that sparsely populated frontier of the United States, some provisions had to be made for orphans and their right to any family estate. An index for the county’s orphan’s court book 1818-1836 is available online, and the book is kept by the Shelby County Historical Society in Columbiana. This first court of the county was later replaced by probate court.
The map below is a close-up portion of Fielding Lucas' 1822 map of Alabama that shows two towns in Shelby County at that time. The map can be seen at the Historical Maps of Alabama online resource. 

A version of this post appeared in the winter 2015 issue of the Pelham City News.