Happy birthday, Homewood

As the city of Homewood celebrates its 90th anniversary in 2016, it’s difficult to narrow down which events helped shape the now-thriving suburb. The city began as several small communities that officially merged together in 1926 and today boasts roughly 25,000 residents. 

A few of the area’s early residents are still around to recount stories of a brimming Edgewood Lake, an electric car service and happy childhood memories in the Rosedale community.

Jake Collins, a 10th-grade U.S. history teacher in Mountain Brook, spent years chronicling the history of his hometown before he began teaching at the high school. 

While a history teacher at Homewood Middle School, Collins started the Homewood History Hunt, a weekly assignment where he would present his eighth-grade students with an old Homewood photo, challenge them to find the spot and take photos of themselves in the same location. 

Over the course of three years and dozens of students, Collins had enough material to write a book, “Images of America: Homewood,” with co-author Martha Wurtele, which hit shelves in November. Via his Homewood History blog, Collins chronicled dozens of stories of Homewood’s past, told through pictures and, when he was lucky, by the people in them.

“The area is a lot older than people think,” said Collins, recounting stories of the arrowheads found buried in and around Oxmoor Valley. “It was inhabited at one point by Native Americans.”

Many of the arrowheads, as Collins described on homewoodhistoryhunt.blogspot.com, were found behind what once was the Oxmoor Furnace — a Confederate Army creation.

Collins, who grew up in Homewood and graduated from HHS in 2001, recalls the fear he had as a child riding his bike up on Shades Mountain along Shades Crest Road, but also the beauty of the area.

“Little did I know,” wrote Collins in the blog, “a town in that valley experienced a glorious rise and abrupt fall before Homewood was even a city.”

‘Furnace men’

That town, Collins explained, grew out of a need to supply weapons to the Confederate Army. The furnace, powered by water from Shades Creek, began operating in the fall of 1863. Somewhere between 260 and 360 men ran the furnace, 60 of whom were known as “furnace men.” The rest were slaves.

Less than a year after the furnace became operational, Colonel J.S. Casement of the United States Army raided and burned Oxmoor Furnace in May of 1864. It is likely, said Collins, that the men followed West Oxmoor Road to the furnace. 

Once the war was over, the furnace was once again put to use in 1873 and later during WWI, before finally being dismantled in 1928.

“What I love about the story of the Oxmoor Furnace is that it’s so easy to connect to,” wrote Collins in the final entry of the blog. “If you’ve driven on Oxmoor Road, you’ve traveled a road that has been in use since the Civil War. If you’ve driven down West Oxmoor past Homewood Church of Christ, you’ve driven down a road that, more than likely, Union troops used to raid the furnace.”

In 1911, while the furnace still boomed, another part of Homewood, what today is still known as Edgewood, continued its own growth thanks to the Edgewood Electric Railway. This part of Homewood’s history, said Collins, is among his favorites, all of which he learned about by reading Sheryl Spradling Summe’s book “Homewood: The Life of a City.”

Edgewood’s founders, Collins learned, realized there was a need to provide transportation to and from Shades Valley, as well as Edgewood Lake, then a manmade 117-acre lake.

In an October 2013 Homewood Star article titled “Remembering Edgewood Lake,” Leah Rawls Atkins, Ph.D., a historian who taught for almost three decades at Auburn and Samford Universities, recounts her memories growing up on Columbiana Road just a block from the Edgewood Lake dam.

“Fed by Shades Creek and by the little creeks and drainage ditches that flowed rainwater into Shades Creek from as far away as Homewood and Mountain Brook, the lake was nestled at the foot of Shades Mountain,” wrote Atkins. “The road to Columbiana crossed over the dam and then climbed up the mountain.”

The original plan, explained Atkins, was for the Birmingham Motor and Country Club to build a motor speedway around the lake.

“Although the north and south runs were graded and eventually became Lakeshore and South Lakeshore Drives,” she wrote, “the raceway was never completed.”

What the Motor Club did complete eventually became Edgewood Country Club and later Edgewood Park, run by R.R. Rochelle.

The lake, stocked with bass, bream and catfish, attracted lots of fisherman, said Collins, who would take the Edgewood Electric Railway to the lake’s northern shore.

The railway, nearly impossible to find traces of today, began in Southside, continued over the mountain and ended on Broadway in Edgewood. A small remaining fragment is visible on the corner of Manhattan and Parkridge.

By the time the railway had been completed, Homewood’s oldest and most historic neighborhood, Rosedale, had long been established.

RISE OF ROSEDALE

Many of the first settlers of the Rosedale area, Collins wrote in a February 2015 blog post, were probably coal mine workers. In the early 1900s, the first two prominent black settlers, John Wilkins, from Blue Creek, and Damon Lee, from Eufaula, arrived. Lee’s Grocery, which Damon Lee began, was run by his son, Afton Sr., until the 1980s.

By the 1920s, the area needed its own school. B.M. Montgomery, known as “Fess,” was one of the first education pioneers in Rosedale, Collins said. Montgomery’s nephew, Edward Perkins Montgomery, said he remembers his uncle stopping by his house and speaking to his father nearly every day. Fess, said Edward, became principal at Rosedale High School when he was only 14 years old. After his funeral, Edward said he remembers poring through some of his uncle’s belongings and discovering the very detailed plans of what he wanted the school to become.

Edward Montgomery’s memories of growing up in Rosedale, Collins discovered, were similar to the ones he remembers growing up in the Mayfair neighborhood.

“Afternoons in Rosedale were filled with football games, baseball games (there was a ball field referred to as, ‘the ball diamond’ roughly where HWY 31 separates Rosedale and the old Shades Valley High School), and visiting other people in the neighborhood,” wrote Collins in the February blog post. “Although we grew up in different times and different sides of downtown Homewood, we still share a love for our community because of the wonderful time we had as kids.”

In fact, Edward’s memories of the education he received in Rosedale are so positive, he credits it to saving his life.

“We had to behave at school,” said Edward. “We were there to learn.”

At Rosedale, Edward learned to type. When he was drafted to serve in Vietnam, Edward was pulled out of basic training and placed in an office job.

“As far as he knows,” said Collins, “he’s the only man out of his original platoon that survived the war. His life was literally saved because of his education.”

In 1926, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, Charles Rice, a local attorney often referred to as the “Father of Homewood,” established a movement to merge several of the communities. In September 1926, Rosedale, Edgewood and Grove Park merged and incorporated under the name “Homewood.” The first city hall complex, according to the encyclopedia, was built in 1928.

Though clues to Homewood’s past are not always readily apparent, Collins said we should look for them and pay attention to them.

“We encounter history every single day but we have to take the time to understand what we’re doing,” he wrote. “History is all around us, and my hope is that, over the last three years, the Homewood History Hunt has given people a reason to learn more about our city, in hopes that we will work to preserve the stories of our city for future generations.”