Birmingham Historical Society
invites you to
An Evening in Honor of George B. Ward
Monday, November 1, 2021
7:00 p.m. Strange Auditorium
at
Birmingham Botanical Gardens
PROGRAM
By Marjorie White
SIGNING OF THE NEWLY RELEASED
Birmingham: The City Beautiful, Compliments of G. Ward
Published by the Society
with the financial support of
The Sterne-Agee Foundation
Members paid for 2021 may pick up their copy of the new release.
Books not picked up will be mailed following the meeting. Additional copies will be available for purchase for $30 (cash or check), both at the meeting and from Birmingham Historical Society, One Sloss Quarters, Birmingham, AL 35222.
INVITATION FRONT: Left, top to bottom: George Ward, Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, 1907; Birmingham City Hall (1901-1950); George Ward Park, 1901 Greensprings Avenue, Birmingham.
Center, top to bottom: The Relay House, the city’s first hotel and home to the Ward family, its proprietors (1871-1886); Cover, Birmingham: The City Beautiful booklet prepared and signed by Mayor G. Ward, 1908; View of Birmingham at the Red Mountain Gap, the city’s first protected viewshed, enacted 1929.
Right, top to bottom: George Ward, investment banker, builder of Vestavia, 1926; Ward’s Vestavia temple residence (1926-1971); Ward’s Temple of Sibyl (1929), as relocated to its park site on U.S. 31 at the entrance to today’s City of Vestavia Hills. Historic photographs courtesy Birmingham, Alabama Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscripts; color photographs courtesy Abraham Odrezin, 2020.
“George Ward was a most unusual and an unusually accomplished man with a significant legacy. Ward was alderman, mayor, and city commission president, an investment banker, a civic and community leader, a student and a reader, a writer, a lover of classics, a gentleman farmer, an idealist, sentimentalist, natu- ralist, conservationist, birder, and floriculturist, in short, a many-sided man of extraordinary ability.”
— Marjorie L. White, Author, Birmingham: The City Beautiful, Compliments of G. Ward
“Birmingham: The City Beautiful, Compliments of G. Ward is a fundamentally important contribution to the material available on our community. It places Birmingham in the City Beautiful Movement in the context of urban America. The document can also serve as a guide for citizens interested in becoming en- gaged in their community. It is a manual of civic participation. Three cheers.”
— Edward S. Lamonte, Retired Professor of History, Birmingham-Southern College, Former Chief of Staff to Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington Jr.
“Every man, woman, and child in Birmingham seems to be imbued with the city beautiful idea. I have never observed in any other city universal interest as is being manifested by the people in this city.”
— Warren Manning in “Manning Tells of Progress of Work-Talks to Commission of City Beautiful Plan,” Birmingham Ledger, November 19, 1914
Birmingham Historical Society 