Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Josephine Jerald has lived in the house she grew up in for decades.
Red clay and creek water. The smell of rich earth after rain, rising from unpaved streets where children played. Front porches where the world slowed, where time moved differently than it did across the mountain. This is the Rosedale that came first, the neighborhood that built itself.
90-year-old Josephine Jerald was born and raised in Rosedale.
“We walked everywhere. Our streets were not paved, and when it rained, our shoes got muddy, and we changed into clean shoes at church. Later, I would walk to Hollywood and clean houses for $2.50 a day, then go downtown and get ice cream cones at the Homewood Creamery. Life was simple back then,” Josephine Jerald said.
Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Josephine Jerald at her Rosedale house with food pantry volunteers Kelly and Bobby Patrick.
She remembers her father buying the house she still lives in and adding onto it himself, room by room, year by year.
Homewood’s centennial in 2026 marks 100 years since three communities merged to form the city. But Rosedale was already here. It was born first, in 1886, when the Clifton Land Company deemed the red clay acres unsuitable for white buyers and sold the land cheap to Black buyers who saw possibility.
Benjamin F. Roden of the Clifton Land Company sold the first parcels to a nurseryman named Theodore Smith. Alexander Johnson bought some of the earliest lots. By 1900, the census showed what these buyers had built: a neighborhood where 95% of residents owned their homes free and clear. Laborers and craftsmen, furnace workers and merchants, teachers and tradespeople who had bought land for $20 or $30 an acre, who had built houses and expanded them over decades, holding the land the way you hold something you mean to keep.
B.M. Montgomery arrived in the 1920s as Rosedale’s school principal. He stayed for 42 years, until 1967. Under his leadership, Rosedale School became the first school in Jefferson County to teach Black students above the junior high level. It was a quiet revolution, one classroom at a time, in a neighborhood where education was understood as the thing that would last.
It was a neighborhood built on proximity and knowing.
Photo by Karim Shamsi-Basha.
Dennis Bush and Annalise DeVries take a walk through Rosedale.
Dennis Bush is gym supervisor at the Lee Community Center. He grew up in Rosedale.
“It was one of the best places. Everybody knew everybody. Strong sense of family community. It’s still that way. People cared about one another back then, and they do now. The people of Rosedale love Rosedale,” Bush said.
This sense of community survived displacement and threat.
In September 1963, the same month the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in downtown Birmingham, a bombing took place on Central Avenue in Rosedale. No arrests were documented.
In the mid-1960s, the Red Mountain Expressway widened and split Rosedale in two. What had been one continuous neighborhood was suddenly interrupted by concrete and speed. The three founding neighborhoods of Homewood, supposedly equal partners in 1926, did not experience this displacement equally. Rosedale bore the burden.
Rosedale started with 110 acres. Fewer than 30 acres of houses remain.
In 1968, Afton M. Lee Sr. became Homewood’s first Black council member. Decades later, his daughter Adrienne Lee founded the Rosedale Community Development Corporation. In 1988, the CDC built the first two Habitat for Humanity homes in the neighborhood. The work of rebuilding, of remembering, of staying, continued quietly, house by house.
In 2004, both Rosedale districts were placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The recognition was significant. It did not, however, include a preservation ordinance. Without legal protection, what remains is vulnerable to development pressure, to the kind of erasure that comes not from a single dramatic act but from the slow accumulation of choices made elsewhere, in offices and zoning meetings by people who do not live in Rosedale and do not walk its streets.
Annalise DeVries, an associate professor of history at Samford University, began working with the Rosedale community in 2019 on what would become the Rosedale Memory Project. Her digital history students proposed digitizing the neighborhood’s artifacts and stories. The archive grew to include oral histories and community documents, creating what she describes as a richer understanding of Homewood’s overlooked past.
“We wanted to preserve this history without taking the artifacts away from the community,” DeVries said. “For Rosedale, which lost so much of its identity in the sixties, making this history available and accessible matters.”
The project continues to grow at rosedalememoryproject.omeka.net, where rotating groups of students digitize archival materials, preserving neighborhood memory for future generations.
The creek still runs. The red clay remains, holding memory in its grain, and the families who stayed wrote their stories into this ground. Rosedale was already here, and something of that presence lingers still.
