Gadsden Postcard: Forrest Cemetery Chapel

This postcard brings back some memories. My paternal grandparents, Amos J. and Rosa Mae Wright are buried in Forrest Cemetery, as well as Beulah Vee Wright, my dad's older sister I never met. In the late 1950s and early 1960s during the summers I would get to visit my grandparents in Gadsden for a couple of weeks. Amos was still working as yard foreman for L&N Railroad, so Rosa Mae would often take me to do things during the day before we picked him up at the railyard after work. One of those trips would be a visit to Forrest Cemetery to see Beulah Vee's grave. Since those days my grandparents have died and been buried beside their daughter. You can see gravestone photos below.

The first burial in Forrest Cemetery was Sallie Law Woodliff, a 1.5 year old child. She was the daughter of A.L. Woodliff who had selected the site and began clearing it with the help of his three sons. She died 13 Jul 1872. The chapel was built 1935-36 by the Works Progress Administration from sandstone quarried on Lookout Mountain. That chapel was named the Ruth R. Cross Memorial Chapel in 1960 after a woman who had devoted much time to the cemetery's care. Forrest Cemetery includes 40 acres and is located on South 15th Street in Gadsden.

The card with its "Tichnor Quality View" was published by the Franklin News Agency. Between July 1, 1919 and January 1, 1952, the postage rate for a U.S. postcard was a penny. Tichnor Brothers, Inc., of Boston operated from 1908 until 1987 and was a major publisher of postcards. I was unable to find anything on Franklin and am unsure what their role was. 

A brief history of the modern postcard at the Library of Congress site can be found here.

The rear of the chapel is visible in the distance in this photo.

We have other relatives buried in this cemetery. For instance, two of Rosa Mae's sisters, Stella Vinyard and Maude Wright, are interred there. 

Amos J. and Rosa Mae Wright, probably around the time of their wedding on 31 October 1915. 

Beulah V. Wright

Alfred Spielberg operated a photography studio in Gadsden. According to records at Ancestry.com, he died in 1967. 

Source: Find-A-Grave 

Noccalula Falls Back in the Day [1000th post]

Well, here we are at my 1000th posting on this blog since March 2014. Scary. 

I thought I would devote this one to a bit of family history. 

In July 2016 I wrote a series of five blog posts about a cedar chest full of personal items belonging to my Dad's older sister Beulah Vee Wright. Part One gives a lengthy introduction. She died in December 1939 at the age of eighteen, so the items date from the 1920's and 1930's. Beulah Vee and my Dad and their parents lived in Gadsden, Alabama. In 2021 I wrote a follow-up post describing our donation of much of the material in the cedar chest to the Alabama Department of Archives and History. You can see a short video about the Beulah Vee portrait among those donated items at the Archives page on YouTube. The actual cedar chest and a small group of other items remain in the family.

We also have numerous photographs taken by her parents, Rosa Mae and Amos J. Wright, Sr. Some of these include a trip to Noccalula Falls in October 1938 and feature Beulah Vee and her boyfriend Porter,  and Rosa Mae. I've also included some photos I took on a visit in 1968. 

The city of Gadsden bought land including the falls in 1946 and has been developing the park ever since. The now expanded area includes campgrounds, a wedding chapel, butterfly and botanical gardens, a covered bridge, pioneer village, minigolf and other amenities. 

My brother Richard and I have some memories of several visits to the falls in the 1960s. Every year in August the Griffith families and other relatives on Rosa Mae's side met for a large reunion, and we often came from Huntsville for the event. Lots of good food was eaten and while the adults talked the kids could play on the rocks, walk the trails to see the old cabins and ride the little train. I seem to remember Dad taking us down the steep trail and under the falls at least once. Of course, the statue of Princess Noccalula reminded us of her legendary leap. 

More comments are below some of the photos. 

Beulah V., October 16, 1938

Beulah V., October 16, 1938. Those shadows must be Amos, Rosa Mae and Porter. 

Porter Hill [her last boyfriend] and Beulah V., October 16, 1938

I've obtained a copy of Beulah Vee's death certificate, which shows her passing at 9:30 a.m. on December 10, 1939. She was attended by Dr. J.W. Ford, who was the family physician. Cause of death is listed as bilateral pulmonary tuberculosis, which I guess explains why her funeral was held the next day. 

From September 7-27, 1939, Beulah Vee kept a diary in a small notebook while she was a patient at Holy Name of Jesus Hospital in Gadsden. A page is included above dated September 14. She notes that "No flowers came" but "Porter came." The notebook records such events as well as how she felt on particular days. In the back the names of her attending nurses are recorded. 

Some years later my mother's obstetrician in Gadsden, Dr. Ford's son, told her his father decided after her death that Beulah Vee may have died of leukemia. People can live for years with tuberculosis, but Beulah Vee's sickness began in March 1939 and she deteriorated rapidly until her death. There was also no treatment for leukemia at that time. 

Rosa Mae Wright [1900-1997]
You can see more photos of her and my grandfather Amos J. Wright, Jr., here and here. 

This photo and the ones below were all processed in June 1968; presumably the family trip to the Falls was in or around that month. I took the photos with a camera I bought on Friday, July 29, 1966, according to notes I made at the time. 

I'm not sure what this mound of stones was or if it's still at the park. Perhaps someone can tell us in the comments. 

I have been unable to determine who is buried beside this cabin. 

Here are a couple of postcards from my collection. 

Source and other photos of the Falls are here. A good account of the legend and its literature can be found on the BhamWiki site. 

Some Family Photos Winter 1954

I've done a few posts on this blog exploring old family photographs. One included some photos taken at the Chandler Street house years after my toddler pictures below. I've also written one about a family vacation at the beach in 1956 and a group of family photos from the 1960s. 

Now we come to some examples from the winter of 1954. I turned two that March 3. Most of these photos were taken at my paternal grandparents' house at 1313 Chandler Street in Gadsden. We lived in Huntsville but visited Rosa Mae and Amos Wright numerous times over the years. 

My family is blessed--or cursed--with hundreds of photographs old and new. I'm sure I'll be exploring more subjects in the future. 

Happy, happy, joy, joy!

I was always looking at rocks or sticks. 

I don't seem quite as happy here as in the first photograph.

Here I am with dad, Amos J. Wright, Jr. He probably took most of these photos, but presumably my grandfather took this one.

I presume that photographer's shadow is dad's. Someone else standing to the right? 

Look, dad, a shadow!

Prepare to get wet, dad!

My grandmother Rosa Mae Wright died in January 1997, shortly before her 97th birthday. My grandfather Amos J. Wright, Sr., had died in 1975. These color photos were taken the day in 1997 when my brother Richard and I came to get the final items out of the house. 

Here's the back yard where we all spent so much time over the years.

Richard is standing in the driveway close to where I was standing--or sitting--in some of those photos above 43 years earlier. 

Here I am as a young sprout between my paternal grandparents, Amos Jasper Wright, Sr., and Rosa Mae Wright. I'm not sure where this photo was taken but I'm looking pretty young here; I was born in March 1952. You can see my grandparents in 1918 in this post about my grandfather's World War I training in Auburn. 

Beulah Vee's Cedar Chest (1)

Part 2 of this series can be found here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here.




My dad's older sister and thus my aunt Beulah Vee Wright has always been something of a mystery in the family. Born in Gadsden on November 2, 1921, she died soon after her eighteenth birthday on December 10, 1939. She had attended Etowah High School, graduating that spring despite a serious illness that had begun in March. She is buried in Forrest Cemetery in Gadsden with my grandfather Amos J. Wright, Sr., and grandmother, Rosa Mae Wright. 

This event was a cataclysmic one in the family, especially for my grandmother. She never really got over it despite living until 1997. My grandparents' social life apparently changed drastically. My grandfather and father pretty much had to warn everyone not to bring up Beulah Vee's name; the memory must have been too painful. Unfortunately, I never brought the subject up with my father before he died; his memories of his sister would have been interesting to know, since he was 13 when she died.

Despite its effect on her and her desire not to talk about her daughter, my grandmother maintained something of a shrine to her. The furniture purchased for Beulah Vee's bedroom became the guest room furniture in a house where she never lived that my grandparents moved to in the late 1940's. My aunt's portrait shown below hung on the wall of that guest room. And then there was the cedar chest.

My grandmother saved clothes, documents, and various objects of her daughter's life and kept them in the cedar hope chest she and my grandfather had bought for her at some point. Some of those items will be explored in several posts to follow. The chest is stuffed with material--it is a time capsule that captures the life of a young and then a teenage girl in Gadsden, Alabama, in the 1920's and 1930's. 

My daughter Becca is the only grandaughter on my father's side; there are also three grandsons. Her great-grandmother thus wanted her to have Beulah Vee's furniture and chest. The furniture has been kept in our house in Pelham since my grandmother died in 1997; the chest remained at my parents' house in Huntsville. 

Recently Becca and her husband moved to Oklahoma, and they took all the furniture and the chest with them to fill a guest bedroom. In these posts I'll share our fascination with all this material and a young woman neither of us ever met.

In this post I want to introduce Beulah Vee using some family photographs. Most of them below have handwritten captions; they were written on the back by my father.  

In the lower right corner of this oil portrait of my aunt is the artist's signature in red: "T. Takada". And therein lies a tale. Just after World War II my dad's cousin in the military, Lacy Wright, was stationed in Japan. He noticed a number of Japanese artists were painting portraits from photographs for a small fee. He wrote his aunt Rosa Mae Wright, Beulah Vee's mother, and told her he would have such a portrait done if she would send him a photograph.  

Here is the famous cedar chest. The contents will be explored in more posts in this series. 

W.E. Striplin Elementary School as it exists today

Source: Gadsden Public Schools