Homewood History Hunt

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The Homewood Jake Collins now knows is not the same one he grew up in. For him, long-familiar places now glisten with a sheen of history.

Today he knows that Shades Creek, where he fished regularly in high school, once fed into a large lake that lined Lakeshore Drive. His elementary school, Shades Cahaba, was a high school, and his grandfather played on its football field. The tracks where Manhattan Street dead ends into Homewood Park — the ones he thought were once for a train — were an old streetcar line that ran behind Dawson Family of Faith, where he grew up in church.

Sam’s Super Samwiches, whose burgers he eats every Saturday, was a barber shop, and Homewood Barber Shop, another regular stop for Collins, was once a bar.

 “I never thought of how before there was I-65 and 280 that downtown Homewood was the only way to downtown Birmingham,” he said. 

Now the 2001 Homewood High School graduate is sharing his journey through familiar places past and present with his students at Homewood Middle School. 

Last year a dozen eighth-graders regularly participated in Collins’ Homewood History Hunt. This year, he collected 60 photos in the first nine weeks from just one class.

To create the hunt, Collins has pored over the pages of Homewood: The Life of a City by Sheryl Spradling Summe, dug through archival photos and news clippings, and talked with community members who remember the days of Edgewood Lake and streetcars.

Every Monday he posts an old photo with clues to find its current location, and students have until the following Monday to find it and take photos of themselves in front of the landmark. The students like to use social media platform Instagram to post their photos, but Collins tells them to keep their accounts set on private and requires they email him the photo or show it to him in person. Fulfilling the quest earns the students bonus points on their current events quizzes (and an “extra effort cookie” for doing something like talking to the business owner), but the pursuit has turned into more than that.

“It’s neat to see how students are doing things they like to do but with local history,” Collins said.

He teaches his students about how Edgewood Lake occupied acres where they now play on soccer fields — and left Native American artifacts in its beds once it was drained.

But before he opens his mental canon of historical tales, Collins sends students to search for the former sites of Hollywood Country Club, the city hall that was torn down to make way for aloft Hotel, the Edgewood Lake dam, West Oxmoor Furnace and streetcar tracks. Hunt destinations also include buildings that still stand, such as the old Homewood Theatre (now Cahaba Cycles), the area’s seven cemeteries and various historic homes.

“I think they like knowing about what was there then,” Collins said. “They like feeling a part of where they are.”

On the week students were assigned to Shades Cahaba School, Amber Robinson’s grandfather, Andrew Tyson, helped her come up with a special photo idea. He had taken a photo of her mother, Jennifer, walking up from the street tunnel under U.S. 31 on her first day of elementary school. Decades later, Tyson came out and took a photo of Amber holding her mom’s photo from that day as a submission for the history hunt.

One Saturday last spring, Collins took two students fishing on Shades Creek with the hopes of finding a bridge he saw on a map that led from Oxmoor Road to the back side of the West Oxmoor furnaces that operated in the 1800s. The trio trekked through frigid creek waters and discovered just what they had been looking for.

This fall a troop of six history hunters talked to Diana Hansen, owner of White Flowers, the site of the former Dunn’s Pharmacy in downtown Homewood. She was so proud of them for being interested in the history of Homewood that she invited them to her house the next week to give them a tour of her home, the historic Bridges Studio in Edgewood.

That particular group — Maxwell Ross, Camille Colter, Caroline McCormick, Kierra Smith, Meg Herndon and Ben Galloway — gathers every Thursday afternoon in search of that week’s hunt. They try to take a photo with the owner or manager of the location and then pose for what they call an “awkward family photo.” Rashel Post, Maxwell’s mom, accompanies the group on their excursion each week.

“I think it’s such a great way to get kids moving and involved,” Post said. “Even though it is in their own backyard, it encourages them to look for history in their world around them. I wish I had a big charter bus to pick up a bunch of kids each week and take them to do it.”

Collins has found that even friends he didn’t expect to have any interest are asking about his historical photos. At Open House this fall, parents didn’t want to talk about anything except the History Hunt. For him, though, the biggest mission is sharing the history with the students themselves.

“Just like I tell the students they should know whose faces are on their dollar bills, I think it’s important to know what used to be here,” he said.