The Birmingham Historical Society’s Annual Meeting for 2023 has been scheduled for February 27, 2023 at 7 p.m. at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. (Free and open to the public)
Our speaker will be Kari Frederickson, professor of Southern History at the University of Alabama, speaking on The Bankheads of Alabama and autographing her recently published book Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama.
“Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama is a deeply researched epic family biography that reflects the complicated and evolving world inhabited by three generations of the extremely accomplished—if problematic—Bankhead family of northwest Alabama. Kari Frederickson’s expertly crafted account traces the careers of five members of the family—John Hollis Bankhead; his sons, John Hollis Bankhead Jr. and William Brockman Bankhead; his daughter, Marie Bankhead Owen; and his granddaughter, Tallulah Brockman Bankhead.”
Note that the Heritage Cake & Pie Competition will happily return to the BHS annual meeting February 27 at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. More info to come in early ’23. If you’re not familiar with this popular annual event, please click HERE!
An historic 1924 apartment building on Highland Avenue is our NEW/OLD location! Birmingham Historical Society members and volunteers have been slowly moving 37 years of research documents and publications from The Duncan House at Sloss Quarters to 2827 Highland Avenue on Birmingham’s Southside.
Many thanks in particular to Pat & Ehney Camp, The Camp Foundation, John Lauriello with SouthPace Properties, BHS President Wayne Hester, Regina & Blue Ammon, Gerry Waters, Carol Slaughter, Carol Ogle and Marjorie White for making this vision a reality.
Read more about the interesting history of our new location in September’s newsletter HERE. Our mailing address remains P.O. Box 321474/Birmingham, AL 35232.
Please mark your calendars for the fall meeting of the Trustees of Birmingham Historical Society, the first in our new offices at 2827 Highland Avenue/35205 at noon on the second Tuesday of September (September 13th, 2022).
Print copies of Birmingham Historical Society Mission, Accomplishments, and Justification for Support will be in hand and progress reports on the capital campaign for the endowment.
Friends of Shades Mountain are sponsoring a Benefit Concert at Wild Roast Cafe in Bluff Park, featuring great live folk, mountain, and classical guitar music, as well as original songs by the President of the Birmingham Music Club
Sunday, September 11th, 6:00PM
Click image to download & print pdf invitation
The Birmingham Historical Society continues to research the historic importance of Shades Mountain and Shades Creek to our community with recent attention focused on Brock’s Gap, and the publication of Shades Creek–Flowing Through Time. But the Friends of Shades Mountain also want to preserve it for the benefits it provides all of us NOW including:
The forest protects homeowners below from erosion, mudslides and damaging storm water runoff.
It helps keep the water and air in the county clean.
By providing visual screening, the forest enhances property values in the valley below and the ridge above the mountain.
It provides habitat for many plant and animal species, some rarely seen in other parts of the county and state.
It is an aesthetic value in itself, providing a lush green landscape that cools the eye of everyone coming around, over and under its forest canopy.
It helps protect Shades Creek, already imperiled by previous development.
The forests along this mountain help to keep homes cooler by reducing the effects of hot, humid summer days. In the winter, the forest provides wind brakes that cut heating costs.
The forest cover saves the county an estimated $1,500,000 per year by reducing air pollution and storm water runoff.
You can HELP by buying tickets or donating if you can’t attend.
Please note our change of location to: 2827 Highland Avenue/Birmingham, AL 35205. At this time, the BHS business office is open ONLY for scheduled meetings and appointments, and our mailing address remains unchanged at P.O. Box 321474/Birmingham, AL 35232. When our ongoing renovations are completed, a formal opening will be announced. (UPDATE: OPEN HOUSE November 13th, 2-4PM)
A big thanks to all those who made this move possible including John Lauriello of Southpace Properties, architect and BHS Trustee Wayne Hester, and The Ehney Camp Foundation.
One of the most anticipated Birmingham Historical Society events each year is the annual Heritage Society party. It often features one of Birmingham’s most magnificent historic mansions and this year was no exception, with the Bush-Hill-Cooley residence.
Bush-Hill-Cooley Heritage Society Party 2022. Photo: Louise McPhillips
Local architectural firm, Warren, Knight, & Davis, was hired by Morris Bush soon after his marriage in 1920 to design a proper English manor house on top of the mountain on a large lot in a subdivision developed by Jemison & Co. The widely-respected firm designed a Tudor Revival style residence of smooth-face, random-laid Indiana limestone with steep roofs, gables, large chimneys, and surrounded by substantial gardens in keeping with the examples established by King Henry VIII (Henry Tudor) after the reformation.
Morris Bush (age 48) moved his bride Margaret Gage Bush (age 33) to the magnificent residence in 1928. Following subsequent funerals for both of her parents, his mother, and their next door neighbor, finally good news! Their beloved daughter, Gage, was born in 1931, but sadly, the following year, Morris Bush died of a massive heart attack. Margaret couldn’t bear to stay in the house after all that unhappiness and moved in 1934.
James Hill, president of the local Hill Grocery Co., his wife Rena McMurray Hill, with their son Delmar, purchased the estate in 1934 from Margaret Bush and they would live there for the next 30 years, followed by Rena and her sister, for the next decade. The Hill family thrived despite the Depression due to their ’shop local’ philosophy, positioning a neighborhood grocery store within walking distance of many households as well as their support of ‘cash and carry’ (including script issued by local industrial firms).
After Ed Craig, and then Lanny & Brenda Vines lived there, Tammie & Jim Dandy Cooley purchased the estate in 2015. They’ve enjoyed working with architect Hank Long of Henry Sprott Long & Associates to renovate the home and restore the features and plantings of the surrounding gardens.
”Three years on the inside and then three years on the outside” as Tammie Cooley describes the couple’s ongoing love affair with the residence and its gardens. As Jim Dandy adds, ”we see ourselves as the current stewards of this timeless place.”
Bush-Hill-Cooley Heritage Society Party 2022. Photos: Louise McPhillips
Much appreciation to the Cooley family for sharing the rich history and their labor of love with the Heritage Society this year!
At its annual meeting on February 28th, the Birmingham Historical Society celebrated its 80th year. James White first shared a report on its financial history and its founders, as well as the current safeguards that protect its financial future. The Society’s stated goals of research, publication, and education often provide new owners with information that can enhance their property with unexpected historical perspective. Slossfield Maternity Center is an example of just that and three speakers highlighted its importance from their unique perspectives.
The Slossfield Community Center was added to the National Trust of Historic Places in May of 2008. It was purchased in 2018 by The Salvation Army with plans for it to be once again used as a core community center.
Slossfield is a complex of concrete buildings at the Finley Avenue exit off I65, built in the 1930’s and surrounded by industrial facilities including ACIPCO, Sloss, US Pipe, coal mines and quarries. One of the buildings, The Slossfield Maternity Center, was constructed in 1939 by WPA labor to train black physicians and nurses and improve prenatal care and delivery in one of the most underserved and poorest areas of Birmingham at that time. Under the leadership of Dr. Thomas Boulware, Jr., Slossfield became the most successful of four demonstration centers built by the U.S. Public Health Service in the late 1930’s.
The first speaker, Sharon Holley, is Director of the new nurse-midwifery program at UAB School of Nursing, and is passionate about the role that midwifery can continue to play in providing safe births and healthy babies. In researching Slossfield via UAB archives, she presented statistics illustrating that Slossfield had become a model of good prenatal and obstetric care reducing the infant and mother mortality rate in that area by up to 92%.
At that time, blacks could only be admitted to hospitals in Birmingham by white physicians. The few black doctors were not able to admit patients to hospitals until 1952 when Holy Family Hospital was built in Ensley. Consequently, most black births prior to that time were at home, assisted by midwives, as the Slossfield Maternity Clinic was reserved for high risk deliveries, or first time mothers. Holley spoke about how we can use Slossfield’s historic example in creating a program for today’s mothers.
Left to right above: Sharon Holley, Thomas Boulware III, and John Stamps Left to right below: Living conditions in Slossfield during 1930’s, Maternity Center under construction, location of Maternity Center on complex at far left
Dr. Thomas Boulware, Jr. came to Birmingham from Missouri in 1929 to serve in Norwood Clinic (soon to be known as Carraway Hospital) under Dr. Charles Carraway. He was quite young and immediately became interested in caring for the underserved communities of Birmingham. Dr. Boulware established the first indigent maternity clinic at Hillman Hospital (UAB), and served as medical director of Slossfield Maternity Clinic, training all the doctors and nurses on staff there.
The second speaker, Dr. Boulware’s son, Thomas Boulware, III, told stories of his father’s commitment to his patients, in one instance, traveling back & forth from North Birmingham to Woodlawn to deliver two babies born on the same evening. He told of his father delivering three generations multiple times, and another in which he had delivered eighteen members of the same family. And he highlighted many of the achievements of his father over an esteemed 60-year medical career in which he delivered over 26,000 babies.
The last speaker, John Stamps, is Director of Operations at the Salvation Army. He pointed out that the Salvation Army is actually a Christian outreach church despite being known primarily for their humanitarian efforts. The Salvation Army purchased the abandoned and deteriorating Slossfield in 2018. They have taken on the challenge of restoring it as a core community center, bringing back many of its original services. John Stamps outlined their plans, and with his new understanding of its origins, hopes to re-establish its significance to the community.
Consulting producer on the PBS film, Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America, Cotton had not only visited, but was often intimately familiar with many of the Olmsted projects he discussed. His slides traveled the audience across America, giving the history, motivation, and importance of each of the parks and green spaces. Many are well-known and include:
Niagra Falls
The Biltmore Estate
Central Park in NYC
Yosemite
The Capitol Grounds and The Washington Mall
The Great White City – Chicago
Boston’s Emerald Necklace
Prospect Park in Brooklyn
Cotton emphasized the social importance of the Olmsted legacy. The green spaces and parks were designed to be available to all walks of life, to enhance the health and well-being of visitors, to encourage social engagement across economic & cultural divides, to provide forestry and landscape experiments, and to stand the test of time. As he stated, Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons were true artists of the landscape, while working on a vast scale, in FOUR dimensions, with the fourth being time…to allow their design visions to mature over decades.
However, their public spaces were not always green, as Cotton illustrated by Olmsted’s plan for the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. There, Olmsted’s step design again encouraged democracy and provided an open forum for public engagement.
As another example, their design for Niagra Falls restored and enhanced the beauty that was already there. Before and after images were startling.
Birmingham has a very rich heritage and Birmingham Historical Society has been researching and publishing educational articles about Birmingham for 80 years. Established in 1942, the Society has published an impressive list of books about its neighborhoods, its origins, its industrial history, and its civil rights history among others.
Today, part of a much loved neighborhood with a variety of affordable housing, Highland Avenue was originally lined with mansions and was the preferred home of many of Birmingham’s founders. The three parks at that time were merely ravines along the popular avenue. So Mayor George Ward, who had a strong interest in public green spaces, declared the ravines on Highland Avenue “parks” assuring that they would remain undeveloped lots.
Rhodes Park, named after the founder of what is now The Birmingham News, is 3 1/4 acres with residential lots that were developed mainly between 1906-1911. The landscape plan was created by Boston landscape architect, George Miller, while some of the architectural features were designed by William Leslie Welton.
Rhodes Park, considered the central park on Highland Avenue, has a number of landscape features not found in the other two. Due to lack of city funds at the time, the stone entrances, steps, and concrete features in Rhodes Park were paid for by the wealthy residents who lived along Highland Avenue at the turn of the century. While the other two ravines remained largely undeveloped, thanks to the efforts of Mayor George Ward, they have nevertheless remained parks, and are included in the Olmsted Brothers plans for green spaces in Birmingham.
