Pelham Heights Hotel

For a few years early in the 20^th century Pelham had its very own resort hotel. The structure with 60 rooms was built in the summer of 1912 as a place for the annual encampment of Alabama Baptists. The grounds also featured a dining hall, auditorium, swimming pool and tennis courts. The religious affiliation did not last, however; and the complex soon became a resort for the general public.

The buildings were located off what is now County Road 52 on the mountain dividing Pelham and Helena. According to one source, Helena, Alabama, by Ken Penhale and Martin Everse, the structures were dismantled in the 1920s and moved to Cook’s Springs in St. Clair county. In his book Historic Alabama Hotels & Resorts James Sulzby includes a chapter on Cook’s Springs, but that hotel and resort were already operating very early in the 20^th century. He makes no mention of the hotel in Pelham.

Today the site of Pelham’s short-lived resort is marked by a Pelham water tower.

Pelham Heights Hotel
[Photo courtesy of the Shelby County Historical Society/President Bobby Joe Seales]

This item originally appeared in the Pelham City News September 2014.

Pondering an Alabama Map (3): Pelham in 1928

This map is the third one I've discussed that shows the tiny community of Pelham. The previous maps were issued in 1917 and 1926. All three full maps can be seen in UA's wonderful Historical Maps of Alabama collection.

Now we come to an Alabama highway map issued by the state highway department. Issued in the fall of 1928, the map was created and published by the General Drafting Company of New York City. Founded in 1909, the company operated for many decades.

On the portion of the map shown below, we can see many familiar towns, from Brighton and Bessemer to Brierfield and Childersburg. U.S. Highway 31 already provides a north-south artery. 

The most current state map shows highway 25, but no highway 62. I could not find state highways 3 or 5 either. No doubt renaming of roads has occurred often in the decades since 1928.

You can still find Simmsville on the current map, east of Indian Springs Village which of course did not exist in 1928. Calcis, a former mining town, is also shown. But Newala, Shannon and Underwood have all disappeared from the state's latest highway map. Shannon was a mining town named after John Shannon who operated a mine there before World War I, according to Virginia Foscue's book Place Names in Alabama. Foscue notes that Underwood was named for a family that settled there in the 1830s. She has no entry for Newala. 

This post concludes the series on Pelham's appearance on three maps early in the twentieth century. Next time I'll take a look more generally at state highway maps.

 A fascinating history of the early "good roads" movement in Alabama is Martin Olliff's "Getting on the Map: Alabama's Good Roads Pathfinding Campaigns, 1911-1912" in the Alabama Review 2015 January; 68(1): 3-30.

Alabama Library History: Bookmobiles

For many decades one of the outreach methods used by public libraries all over America has been the bookmobile. These rolling collections brought reading material to both adults and children who often had no way to get to the city or county's public library building. A recent article by Piotr Kowalczyk on the "10 Most Extraordinary Mobile Libraries" describes a variety of moving libraries from around the world.

Below are some photographs of bookmobiles that once toured the roads in Alabama. These images come mostly from the digital collections of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. In many the vehicle seems to be parked in front of a school, which often had no library or a poorly stocked one. The photographs seem to date from the 1920's and 1930's. Some city and county public libraries in the state still operate bookmobiles including Baldwin, Huntsville-Madison, Mobile and Tuscaloosa. 

Two brief pieces on early bookmobiles can be found in the book The Heritage of Jefferson County, Alabama, published in 2002: "Jefferson County Free Library Bookmobile" by James Spotswood and "When the Bookmobile Came to Aunt Ruth's House" by Frances Hulsey Pardue, both on page 211.

Some nice photographs of the Tuscaloosa County bookmobile from days past can be found here.

This bookmobile was in Anniston.

This bookmobile was operated by the Jefferson County Free Library.

Here the Jefferson County Free Library bookmobile is parked at the U.S. Post Office at New Castle where women are browsing through the choices. New Castle was a mining town near Fultondale; a post office was established in 1874. Some filming for the 1925 silent movie Coming Through was done here. From the looks of the tree and the women's coats, this visit must have taken place in winter.

This photo shows the Jefferson County Bookmobile outside the service entrance to Birmingham Public Library in 1939. Librarian Dorothy West is flanked by two of the bookmobile drivers.

This vehicle seems to have been a rolling advertisement for Cullman County's bookmobile.

Here's a Montgomery County Bookmobile

And finally, a bookmobile in Tuscaloosa County [and finally a grown man!]

Jefferson County Bookmobile in front of the Thomas H. McAdory house in Bessemer ca. 1940

An undated photograph of BPL's "Traveling Branch"

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

This "romance for young moderns" was published in 1956. 

Alabama Medical Journal 1906: What the People & the Doctors Should Know

One of the early posts on this blog was an overview of the Alabama Medical Journal in the year 1907. I wanted to continue looking at that publication and year with comments on the first item in the volume. Oddly, the first issue of Volume 19 was published in December 1906. That's the kind of publishing practice that has driven librarians crazy for decades.

That first article was a talk by Dr. Joseph Nathaniel McCormack [1847-1922] of Bowling Green, Kentucky, who at that time was Chairman of the American Medical Association's Committee on Organization. Some years later he edited Some of the Medical Pioneers of Kentucky.

His speech was given in Birmingham to the December 1906 meeting of the Jefferson County Medical Society. His title: "What the People Should Know About the Doctors and What the Doctors Should Know About Themselves."



McCormack's talk is a long, meandering one, but does have its funny moments; audience laughter is even indicated in this printed version. He opens by noting that he has given frequent talks around the country to doctors and others, many of them no doubt in his role as Chairman of an important AMA committee. He also describes his long career in Kentucky, where he spent more than 25 years on the state's board of health. All of this work and travel put him in contact with many important individuals outside medicine during which he learned something interesting about his own profession.

"Now I started out in life with the impression that I joined a great and dignified and highly respected profession, but when I came in contact with that first legislature twenty-seven years ago, I very soon found that it occupied such a low place in the public estimation that for it to support any bill pending before that legislature lessened the chances for passing that bill; that the endorsement of doctors did more harm than good."

McCormack discovered that many people, including state legislators, had confidence in their own family physicians, who often warned them about the incompetence of other doctors in the area. Thus people thought their own doctors were wonderful and all the others quacks. One of the main points McCormack makes as he closes his talk is to urge doctors not to speak ill of their colleagues.

Another problem he outlines is the sad state of health care during the recent Spanish-American War; many U.S. troops died from preventable diseases due to unhealthy camps. "...in regard to medical and health affairs, the men who have the training of the work have no authority, and the men who have the authority have no training." He is critical of political and military authorities who did not listen to physician calls for changes in the camps and and did not provide better funding.

"This is a bad record for the United States," McCormack declares, "but I am going to show you that the record for Alabama is worse than that." True to his word, he describes the 15,000 cases of "consumption" [tuberculosis] in the state, "with, of course, a very large death rate." The disease could be wiped out if care were taken to prevent bodily discharges from those already sick.

He moves on to typhoid fever in Alabama: 10,000 cases in the state in 1905 with 900 deaths. If water and milk supplies could be kept clean from the flies that often carry it, typhoid too would disappear. "In this State, in the capital of your State, I fanned the flies off of my meal in one fo the best hotels in your State, and tonight in one of the best hotels in this town I did a good deal of the same thing."

McCormack spends a great deal of time describing the method of transmission of typhoid from military camp latrines and urban horse stables that attract flies. Then he reveals racial prejudice no doubt common at the time. "In a city like this it is possible to banish the flies, although I am not positive but what you would have to banish the negroes with them, because they seem to follow darkies very closely." Ahem.

In discussing diptheria in the state, he makes a similar argument about attacking it with milk sterilization and then pinpoints the problem:



Distrust of doctors' motives is hampering many public health efforts that would prevent several terrible diseases from being so widespread.

This transcript of McCormack's talk takes up 23 pages of the journal issue. In the remainder he offers several ways doctors can begin to confront the distrust issue, primarily by meeting with such influential groups as druggists, lawyers and journalists. He also spends several pages [15-17] detailing the fact that most physicians make much less money than the public generally believes.

Suspicians about doctors' motives and skill levels have existed since ancient times. McCormack spoke at a time when anesthesia, knowledge about the real causes of many diseases, operating room cleanliness and increasingly complicated surgeries were combining to create the foundations of the medical care we have today. What should the people know about the doctors? That they are not mostly quacks out for a buck but professionals who can offer knowledge and skills about disease treatment and prevention. What should the doctors know about themselves? That they need to work together, not against one another.

At the close of his talk McCormack was greeted with (Loud applause).

Odetta Sang the Blues...and Folk...and....

        Among the black women who left their birthplace in Birmingham early in life and achieved fame elsewhere are such well-known figures as Condoleezza Rice and Angela Davis and poets Sonia Sanchez and Margaret Walker. Another woman in that category was the flamboyant and mesmerizing singer Odetta.

Odetta in 1961
[Source: Wikipedia]

        Odetta Holmes was born in the city on December 31, 1930. Her father Reuben Holmes died when she was still a young girl, and her stepfather Zadock Felious developed respiratory problems and eventually tuberculosis. Her mother Flora Sanders moved the family to the drier climate in Los Angeles in 1937. Three years later a teacher told Flora her daughter had a singing voice worth training. Odetta graduated from Los Angeles City College where she studied concert and theater music traditions. She knew that as a black woman her possibilities in those fields were limited and realized her music degree studies were “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life.” (Weiner, 2008)

By 1950 she had spent four years in the Hollywood Turnabout Puppet Theatre and toured the West Coast in a production of Finian’s Rainbow. On that tour she discovered coffee houses and the burgeoning folk music scene in San Francisco and began appearing with just her guitar and remarkable voice with its range of soprano to baritone. Soon she was on the road in the United States and around the world, a pattern that ended only when final illnesses prevented such activity.

In the mid-1950s she toured with Lawrence B. Mohr; he later became a political science professor at the University of Michigan. They released one album, Odetta and Larry, in 1954. Two years later she released her first solo album, Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. Over her career she released 18 studio and seven live albums and a dozen compilations. The 1965 release Odetta Sings Dylan was the first major album of all-Dylan material by another performer. At the time the two shared a manager, Albert Grossman, a co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival and also manager of the group Peter, Paul and Mary. (Uhl, 2010) In a 1978 interview Dylan noted that her first solo album had exposed him to folk music and that he had learned all the songs. (Weiner, 2008)

Odetta found much of her material during visits to the Archive of Folk-Song at the Library of Congress, where she listened to the rich collections of work songs, blues, spirituals and white Appalachian and English folksongs. She performed at the 1963 March on Washington, where she sang a song that dated back to the slavery era, “O Freedom.”  This appearance solidified her role as an important performer in the struggles of the civil rights era. She was nominated for Grammy Awards in 1963, 1999 and 2005 but never won.

Late in life she received recognition for her artistry. President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities in 1999. The Library of Congress’ Living Legend Award came in 2003. On March 24, 2007, the World Folk Music Association sponsored a tribute concert in Washington, D.C.  Artists such as Harry Belafonte, Janis Ian, Peter, Paul and Mary, Oscar Brand, and Roger McGuinn appeared to honor her.

Odetta returned for concerts in her native Alabama at least three times before her death. In October 1993, she performed for an hour at the annual Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport. She told Kathy Kemp for an October 20 article in the Birmingham Post-Herald, “One of the few memories I have before leaving Alabama was pretending at music. I remember pounding on the piano and having an aunt claim a headache just to stop me.” Odetta performed in June 2000 in a Saturday night show at the City Stages Festival here in Birmingham.  In February 2005 Odetta appeared in Saturday night and Sunday afternoon shows at The Library Theatre in Hoover. She was accompanied by pianist Seth Farber, also a conductor for stage musicals including Hairspray on Broadway. According to Mary Colurso’s review in the Birmingham News, the 90-minute show included many songs from two recent albums—a 2001 tribute to blues singer Leadbelly, Looking for a Home, and the 1999 release Blues Everywhere I Go.

In addition to her musical career, she acted in several films and television shows, including the 1961 adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1974. She was married three times, to Don Gordon, Gary Shead and blues musician Iverson Minter, known as Louisiana Red. The marriages to Gordon and Shead ended in divorce. She never had any children. Odetta died of heart disease in New York City on December 2, 2008, less than two months before she was scheduled to appear at Barack Obama’s inauguration. A memorial service was held in the city the following February. She was cremated and the ashes spread over the Harlem Meer, a man-made lake in Central Park.

Two photos of Odetta performing in Birmingham at the Municipal Auditorium in 1965 and City Stages in 2000 are available at her BhamWiki entry. 

Odetta performs at the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham in October 1965

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History Digital Collections

Further Reading
              

Uhl, John. Odetta: May the Circle Be Unbroken. Oxford American #71, 2010
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2011/apr/07/odetta-may-circle-be-unbroken/

Weiner, Tim. Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77. New York Times 3 December 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?pagewanted=all




A version of this post appeared on the Birmingham History Center's blog in July 2012.

Sallie Howard Memorial Baptist Chapel near Fort Payne

On our trip to the Fort Payne area in October 2012, wife Dianne and I visited this unusual chapel just outside DeSoto State Park. You can see some of my photos below. Every state has its residents who were very accomplished, very strange, and finally a bit sad. Colonel Milford Howard, the man who built this chapel, is one of Alabama's.

Howard was born in Floyd County, Georgia, in December 1862. In a few years the family moved to Arkansas, but was back in Georgia by 1876. Howard read for the law, moved to Fort Payne in 1880, passed the Alabama bar and set up practice. In 1887 he lost his money in real estate speculation; by 1893 he began giving lectures to earn extra income. Just such a lecture the following year in Washington, D.C., led him to write If Christ Came to Congress as a corruption expose.

In 1894 he became a Populist candidate for U.S. Congress. In Alabama as elsewhere this third party movement drew support from small landowning farmers as well as sharecropping and tenant farmers and organized labor. Since the party opposed the interests of railroads and wealthy industrialists, elections in Alabama and other areas of party strength were often violent in the 1890s. Howard's race was no different but he won despite threats against himself and his family.

Despite a nervous breakdown, Howard ran again in 1896 and won, but moved his family to Cullman. Two years later he decided to leave Congress and he bought a farm near Fort Payne. He returned to legal practice and lecturing and started writing short fiction, but had to declare bankruptcy in 1901. By 1910 he had lost more money and a race for re-election, so the family moved to Birmingham where he hoped to have a more successful legal practice. Six years and another nervous breakdown later, the Howards were back in Fort Payne. He and the family moved to California in 1919 where he hoped to sell scripts.

Out west Howard did manage to publish two novels, Peggy Ware and The Bishop of the Ozarks. Both novels take place in the mountains; Peggy Ware is set in the Buck's Pocket area. He also starred in a silent film version of the latter book. 

By 1923 Howard had returned to Alabama and bought land near Mentone. The plan this time was to open a school for mountain children. This project was dogged by the same financial problems--and nervous breakdown--that seemed attached to Howard. In 1925 his wife Sallie died, and he closed the school. 

The following year he married again, took his new wife Stella to Europe and wrote about the trip for the Birmingham News after their return. His new wife did not care to live in the mountains, and they divorced in 1936. Howard had no income during this time, and generous friends helped him out. He used the money to build the chapel in honor of Sallie. 

By the time he finished, he was very sick and returned to California, where he died in December 1937, just six months after the chapel's dedication. Ex-wife Stella returned his ashes to Lookout Mountain where they rest at the chapel's giant granite boulder.  

Services are held in the chapel each Sunday, and it is apparently a popular spot for weddings. There is a small cemetery next to the chapel and a short walking trail nearby. 

A more detailed life of this fascinating man can be found in Elizabeth S. Howard's 1976 biography, The Vagabond Dreamer. The author is not related to her subject.

Cut! Movies & TV Shows Set in Birmingham

            Recently that gushing fountain of interesting stuff, the io9.com site, ran a piece on “the most popular television show set in every state.” The original list was developed by Business Insider magazine and considered show longevity, audience size, critical response, awards and cultural impact. The list included Bonanza in Nevada, Mary Tyler Moore in Minnesota, In the Heat of the Night in Mississippi and The Walking Dead in Georgia.

And for Alabama? Why, a show set right here in Birmingham, Any Day Now. That article started me thinking about other tv shows and films set in the Magic City.  Here’s what I’ve found so far.

One category of such productions that may come to mind first is documentaries. Spike Lee’s film 4 Little Girls is a well-known example. Released in June 1997, it chronicles the September 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church and its aftermath. Produced by Home Box Office, the film appeared briefly in theaters and has been released on DVD. The song “Birmingham Sunday” by Richard and Mimi Farina and sung by Joan Baez [Mimi’s sister] is used in the film. Sins of the Father, a television docudrama based on the role of Bobby Frank Cherry in this event, was first broadcast in January, 2002.  

Source: Wikipedia

Source: IMDB.com

 

A “reality” television series set in the area premiered on the MTV channel in August, 2006. Two-a-Days explored the on and off-field lives of players on the highly-successful Hoover High School football team. The show consisted of 16 episodes; a second season began in January 2007. A third season was planned but scuttled in the wake of problems that surfaced in the school’s athletic program and in the personal life of head football coach Rush Propst. Both seasons were released on DVD.

Source: Amazon

 

Other documentaries and reality shows have featured Birmingham topics and people. The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement [2011] focuses on the role of African-American barber Mr. Armstrong as he is inducted into the Foot Soldiers Hall of Fame and reacts to the election of Barak Obama. Mighty Times: The Children’s March [2004] chronicles an event in the city in May, 1963; the film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject.  A 1985 Canadian production looked at Jazz in the Magic City.

The 2013 film Skanks tells the story of a local group of actors who produced an original drag musical. She’s a Lady: Memoir of a Downtown Theatre is a 2006 documentary about the Lyric. The Amandas is a 2012 Style Network home makeover program featuring local resident Amanda LeBlanc and her team. The A&E Network crime show The First 48 featured the Birmingham Police Department in episodes beginning in February 2009. City native Robert Clem released one of his documentaries, Jefferson County Sound, in 2012; it profiled several local gospel quartets and has been shown on Alabama Public Television. No doubt many other city people and topics have turned up in film and television documentaries.

Several fictional film and television productions have also featured Birmingham. The earliest one I have been able to find is Camp Meetin’, a 17-minute short released in 1936. A church congregation has an open-air tent meeting to raise money so their pastor can be sent to a conference in Birmingham. Acting in the film are members of the African-American Hall Johnson Choir, a group famous at the time. Johnson and his choir were associated with Marc Connelly’s play The Green Pastures, which had great success on Broadway and in national and international tours. A film version was released in 1936, and Camp Meetin’ may have been made to capitalize on their fame. Since I haven’t seen this short, I am not sure any scenes are actually set in Birmingham.

A film released in April 1976 has plenty of Birmingham connections. Stay Hungry is based on the 1972 novel of the same name by Charles Gaines, a graduate of Birmingham-Southern. The film is entirely set in Birmingham and extensive filming was done in the city. Jeff Bridges plays Craig Blake, a young man who needs one more parcel to complete a shady real estate deal. He visits the gym located there and is attracted to both the receptionist played by Sally Field and the lifestyle of the bodybuilders including one played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won a Golden Globe award for his acting debut. An article about the filming can be found here and of course at the Bhamwiki site.

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Bhamwiki.com

 

Local filming was done around the city and included such places as the Bank for Savings Building, a house on Mountain Brook Parkway, Joy Young Restaurant, the Country Club of Birmingham, Boutwell Auditorium and the fire escape of the Lyric Theatre. The movie’s Olympic Gym was located downtown on 2^nd Avenue North .

Sally Field has noted that the film furthered her career by showcasing her talent beyond The Flying Nun sitcom and other tv work she was known for at the time. Arnold Schwarzenegger has described how friendly his reception as “Mr. Universe” was in the city. Other well-known people in the cast include Fannie Flagg, Joanna Cassidy, Scatman Crothers, Robert Englund and Ed Begley, Jr. The gym owner was played by R.G. Armstrong, born and raised in the Birmingham area, who had a long career as a character actor in numerous films and television episodes.

A more recent film is also set in the Magic City. Clubhouse was released last October and according to the Internet Movie Database description, “is set in a stately old home in Birmingham, Alabama.” “Sinister characters” attempt to take the home from its “humble” owner.  Unfortunately, the IMDb entry does not say where the movie was filmed. Has anyone seen it?

And what about Any Day Now? As far as I know, it’s the only scripted television series set in the city. The CW’s current series Hart of Dixie is set in a fictional small town in south Alabama. These may be the only two scripted television series set in the state.

Source: epguides.com

Any Day Now ran on the Lifetime network from August 1998 until March 2002 for a total of 88 hour-long episodes. Annie Potts and Lorraine Toussaint played middle aged versions of two childhood friends—one white, the other black—who grew up in Birmingham in the 1960s. Potts’ character has remained in town, where she and her husband and two children struggle financially. Toussaint’s character has become a successful attorney in Washington, D.C., but when her father dies she moves back, sets up a practice, and resumes the friendship.
Each episode featured scenes from the lives of the two women in both the past and present. The show ended after four seasons because Potts chose not to renew her contract so she could spend more time with family. According to the IMDb entry, at least some filming was done in Birmingham.  The show does not seem to have been released on DVD but is apparently available on HuluPlus.

This past spring Moms' Night Out appeared in movie theaters. The comedy was filmed in various locations around Birmingham and Shelby County.

Source: IMDB.com

 

If you have seen any of these productions and have information or comments, please feel free to leave them below. I’m sure I haven’t included some productions available, as well as single episodes of series that were set in Birmingham. There may be an update posting in the future. And then there’s a potential post on movies and tv shows filmed but not set in Birmingham, and another one on novels and short stories that take place here, and yet another one on the poetry about Birmingham, and…who knows?

 

A version of this piece appeared on DiscoverBirmingham.org in February 2014.