Alabama

Avondale Park in Birmingham, Alabama, is the central landscape of the surrounding historic district. The park’s development has reflected changes in the Avondale neighborhood since the community was established over two centuries ago. Avondale Park protects an abundant natural spring called “Big Spring,” also known as “King’s Spring” and “Cave Spring.” The spring was the focal point of the rural community established by migrants from Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia who settled in Birmingham’s Jones Valley as early as 1816.

The Mercedes-Benz Visitor Center and Museum, heralded by an enormous Mercedes logo raised atop a sleek pylon, is the striking public face for a sprawling manufacturing complex that opened a new chapter in Alabama economic history. In 1993 the German-based automobile manufacturer announced construction of its first North American plant near Tuscaloosa. Four years later, the plant began operation as part of the international Daimler AG conglomerate.

In Alabama, the popular Beaux-Arts classicism of the early twentieth century expressed itself not only in courthouses, post offices, and the occasional monumental residence, but also in ecclesiastical architecture ranging from Birmingham’s imposing Temple Emanu-el (1913) to small-town houses of worship—usually Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian—scattered throughout the state. Jasper’s First United Methodist Church, originally the First Methodist Episcopal Church, South, is one of the best examples.

Occasionally a house turns up on the rural Alabama landscape that so departs from the norm that it seems to be unique to its time and place, perhaps the result of an innovative collaboration between client and country builder. So it is with this raised cottage plantation house, the older of two unusual and nearly identical dwellings in the fertile Cheaha Valley, not many miles from one of the southernmost peaks of the Appalachians.

This imposing building was erected to house the short-lived East Alabama Masonic Female Institute. In a state with little support for public schools, it usually fell to such private academies to educate the young beyond the bare rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Often the schools were affiliated with a particular religious denomination, and from time to time with the Masons, who viewed education as part of their philanthropic mission to society.

Scattered along both sides of a quiet stretch of State Highway 14 some seven miles northwest of the town of Marion, this unpretentious group of farm buildings offer a remarkable snapshot of the kind of workaday structures that once dotted much of Alabama’s rural landscape. Some fifty buildings comprise a sampler of traditional agricultural architecture that is unrivaled in the state, although their parklike surroundings are now neater and more pristine than when they were the center of a working plantation.

Before the coming of the railroad, Alabama’s system of navigable rivers was a vital link in its agricultural economy—the means by which thousands of bales of cotton annually reached the port of Mobile and the Gulf of Mexico. Gainesville, perched on a wooded bluff overlooking the Tombigbee River, was a key inland shipping point in this trade, as well as a center of local commerce. Similar cotton shipping points, like Cahaba and Claiborne on the Alabama River, have passed into history. And so, for that matter, has most of the nineteenth-century townscape of Gainesville.

Shelby County’s “Rock House” is the only house of its type in Alabama and among only a handful of early stone dwellings documented anywhere across the Deep South from Georgia to central Texas. This structure was an anomaly from the beginning in a region where wood and to a lesser extent brick were the near-universal building materials of choice—even, as in this case, when stone was locally available. The Rock House lies within the greater Birmingham metropolitan area, a few miles southeast of the wealthy suburb of Mountain Brook.

Presenting a striking Ionic colonnade both front and back, this is one of two amphiprostyle courthouses erected in nineteenth-century Alabama—the other being the long-demolished Madison County Courthouse (1837–1842) in Huntsville. Today, the building exudes a flavor of the stereotypical Deep South as it presides over a languid courthouse square (one of the backdrops for the 1968 movie, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter). Its architectural genesis, however, clearly lies in New England.

Sometime in 1908 or early 1909, Montgomery building contractor and Episcopal vestryman Algernon Blair went to Boston to meet with Ralph Adams Cram, principal in the prestigious architectural firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. Blair’s purpose was to solicit Cram’s services in designing a church for a newly organized parish in his hometown.