Lost Auburn: A Village Remembered in Period Photographs

By Ann Pearson, Delos Hughes and Ralph B. Draughon Jr.

Lost Auburn: A Village Remembered in Period Photographs offers a dynamic record of the buildings that once stood in Auburn, Alabama, which have fallen to natural disaster, war, poverty, and neglect, and to what some would call progress. More than two hundred photographs of lost buildings give three historians the opportunity to relate stories of those who once worshipped, learned, and lived in Auburn. Together, these photographs and the accompanying text vividly convey the uniqueness of the village of Auburn that was.

Lost Auburn is more than just a document about the lost architectural fabric of a charming village. It is both a volume of insightful commentary and an opportunity to reflect on the role of community in the life of a Southern town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781603063678

Ann Pearson

As long-time president of the Auburn Heritage Foundation, ANN PEARSON led the successful effort to move the imperiled Nunn-Winston house to safety, and she directed the rescue from neglect of both the white and black cemeteries of early Auburn. She has earned an MA in English from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a PhD in English from Auburn University. She serves on the board of the Historic Chattahoochee Foundation and received the Alabama Historical Commission’s prestigious Roy Swayze Aware for the careful restoration of her own historic plantation, Noble Hall. She is the author of many articles about local history and historic preservation, as well as three mystery novels.

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Lost Auburn

A Village Remembered Through Period Photographs

Ralph Draughon, Jr.

Delos Hughes

Ann Pearson

NEWSOUTH BOOKS

Montgomery

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2014 by Ralph Draughon, Jr., Delos Hughes, and Ann Pearson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-60306-119-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-367-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012037344

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 - The Setting

2 - The College

3 - A Town of Schools

4 - Churches

5 - Early Period Houses

6 - From the Civil War to World Conflict, 1865–1918

7 - Scrapbook of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

8 - Auburn Houses After World War I

9 - Businesses

10 - Movie Theaters

11 - Another Entertaining Business

12 - Public Buildings

13 - Transportation

14 - Peroration

Index

About the Author

Preface

A newcomer to Auburn can ask nearly anyone on the street what the town is like and be regaled with accounts of the latest housing development or business or park. Former Auburnites, however, returning after some absence, are just as likely to be met with puzzled stares if they ask about parts of the streetscape that are remembered but no longer to be found. The authors of this book are such returnees, coming home after absences of various lengths and more or less infrequent visits while living elsewhere. They believe some record should be compiled of Auburn structures that one can no longer see—buildings that have been destroyed, or so altered as to be no longer recognizable, or that have simply fallen into ruin. That is what we have assembled in the pages that follow—a record of lost Auburn buildings. It is not, of course, a complete record. Much of the original Auburn was lost before photographs were common, and many of the photographs taken years ago, like their subjects, are themselves lost. When we are able to find other records of these buildings, we have included the descriptions and anecdotes that preserve their contributions to Auburn life. In bringing this beginning collection to public attention, we hope more of what is now unknown may come to light, to be included, perhaps, in some future edition.

Marcel Proust famously argued that taste and smell evoked better than pictures the essence of recollection, but we cannot offer our readers the taste of a cup of coffee at the Auburn Grille or a whiff of Pauline Wilkins’s pastries at her bakery across the street. It would be even more difficult to describe, much less duplicate, the taste of a banana split at Markle’s Drug Store, a shake at The Flush, or a brew at Pop Raines’s Beverage Shack. Furthermore, we do not wish to celebrate one pervasive smell of yesteryear that everyone of a certain age can recall: the enveloping presence of cigarette smoke. How did we stand it? Why did we put up with it?

But why try to evoke the past at all? One answer, quite reactionary, might be appropriate to residents of a town that Oliver Goldsmith, at least, indirectly, named. In Goldsmith’s play, She Stoops to Conquer, Mr. Hardcastle declares, I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines. And to that backward-looking declaration, some residents of Auburn would add, very emphatically: old buildings!

College students at Auburn in years past, however, might turn to this volume in search, not of everything old, but just the opposite. They might seek to recapture, in essence, their lost youth among the mementos of basketball games at the Barn, movies at the Tiger or the War Eagle, parties at some fraternity house, or socializing at the Casino. And surely that counts as one legitimate purpose of this volume.

This volume was put together in 2011, the 175th anniversary of the town’s founding and a year memorable for a national football championship and the poisoning of the ancient live oaks at the main gate of the college at Toomer’s Corner. Oddly enough, the legal controversy over the poisoning illustrates sharply contrasting points of view in regard to historic preservation. It epitomizes, aptly, the never-ending debate between the importance of a historic landmark and its very mundane worth as real estate. The alleged perpetrator of the poisoning has faced a battery of charges, including attempting to destroy a venerable object. On the other hand, his legal defense has argued that according to the Code of Alabama, an oak tree only has the value of $20, and its destruction only meets the criteria of a misdemeanor. At the time of publication, the case had not yet come to trial, and so the legal question remained unresolved.

In a larger sense, the value of Auburn’s historic landmarks remains unresolved, as well. But how refreshing to know that at least one venerable object in town has invoked legal protection! Alas! This volume identifies many other venerable objects, such as the Drake-Samford House and the original Victorian interior of Samford Hall, that have, most unhappily, been obliterated. Hallowed by tradition, the live oaks at Toomer’s Corner remind us of how precious,and how ephemeral, landmarks in our community can be. Must we lose them to appreciate their worth?

Acknowledgments

This collection of Auburn-iana is a collaboration among many more contributors than the three principal authors. On hearing of the project, friends, acquaintances and strangers have contributed treasured family photographs and barely remembered snapshots. Some of these photographs are already familiar to the public, having been previously published in Auburn: A Pictorial History by Mickey Logue and Jack Simms, as well as in various Auburn University publications.

In addition, we are indebted to a number of others whose assistance has been crucial to our bringing this volume to press. We are indebted to the staff of the Archives and Special Collections division of the university library, especially to Joyce Hicks, an indefatigable archivist, who lent her ingenuity, tenacity and patience to so many of our searches that we acknowledge her efforts as the sine qua non of this volume. The Alabama Historical Commission, in particular Bob Gamble, was another indispensable contributor to our project.

We are also grateful to the many hands who made our work light. Without their assistance, this book would have remained merely a fond hope of its authors and never have made its way through the many steps that led finally to its publication. In addition to our friends at NewSouth Books, we are greatly indebted to and here acknowledge the following contributors, not all of whom may be aware of having helped us.

Individual Contributors: Ward Allen, Richard Bentley, Margaret Goodman Brinkley, Dixie Conner, Marcia Sugg Coombs, Dwayne Cox, Nathaniel Curtis Jr., Christine Blackburn Danner, Hartwell Davis, William Dean, William L. Dennis, Bob Duncan, Jeri Allen Earnest, Linda Ensminger, Totsie Farr, Ada Wright Folmar, Nancy Young and Robert Fortner, Tommy W. Gordon, Harvey Gosser, Ann Tamblyn Gregory, Margaret Toomer Hall, Joseph Hare Jr., Joanna Hoit, Luther M. Holt, Beth Carlovitz Holtam, Barbara Berman Kamph, John Kemph, Jacque Kochak, Jay Lamar, Gail Langley, Fran Marshall Libbe, Lan Lipscomb, Julie Wright Littlejohn, Mickey Logue, Mary Lou Matthews, Rennie McLeod, Elsie Foster Mitchell, Carolyn Seagraves Neal, Mary Norman, Ernestine Robinson, Fran Rollins, Linda Tamplin Sanders, Desmond L. Scaife, Katherine Sherrer, Linda Silavent, Jack Simms, Mary Lou Edwards Smith, Emily Amason Sparrow, Henry Stern, Dr. and Mrs. William Sugg Jr., Jessie and Carl Summers, Carolyn and Billy Tamblyn, Virginia Taylor, Beverley Burkhardt Thomas, Jim Whatley, Edward White, Ethell White, Betty Grimes Williams, Rena Williams, Emil Wright, and Bob Yerkey.

Institutional Contributors: Alabama Department of Archives and History, Auburn Church of Christ, Auburn Public Library, Auburn United Methodist Church, Auburn University Library and Archives, Environmental Data Resources Inc., First Baptist Church of Auburn, First Presbyterian Church of Auburn, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Lakeview Baptist Church, Lee County Historical Society, Library of Congress, St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church, and Village Christian Church.

1

The Setting

Today’s city takes its name from an eighteenth-century poem by Oliver Goldsmith that celebrated Auburn, sweet Auburn! Loveliest village of the plain! The name suited the new community very well, except that the village was situated just inside the Piedmont and not quite on the plains. Auburn indeed was a village, and it remained one well into the twentieth century, as photographs in this volume indicate. Furthermore, early visitors testified to its attractiveness; they remarked on Auburn’s ancient shade trees, natural springs, clean air, healthy locale, and neatly maintained houses and gardens. Nevertheless, the village was not situated in a rich agricultural region. When William LeRoy Broun, the late-nineteenth-century president of the college, was asked why the institution had been located in Auburn, he replied with a bit of irony, For its healthfulness of climate and poverty of soil: any experiment succeeding here would succeed anywhere in the State.

From its earliest days, the village had a difficult to define quality. It possessed character. Besides character, it also had in abundance a supply of characters who certainly added to the community what is known as local color.

The founder of Auburn was Judge John J. Harper of Harris County, Georgia. He led a group of settlers here in late 1836, soon after the forcible removal from east Alabama of the last Native Americans, remnants of the Creek nation. Judge Harper’s party included his mother, half-brothers, eleven children, in-laws, their in-laws, his fifty-three slaves, a contingent of other slaves, and assorted livestock.

Most of them were Methodists. Indeed, Judge Harper was the Moses of the Auburn Methodist Church. He led this group of chosen people out of the land of Georgia into a new Promised Land where Methodist principles, like temperance, were supposed to be practiced, but where John Wesley’s opposition to slavery was paid little heed. Though other denominations soon followed, the Methodists had an important influence on the early history of the village, particularly in outlawing the sale of alcohol and establishing educational institutions.

Judge Harper’s half-brother, Nathaniel Scott, led the movement to establish the Auburn Masonic Female College, which opened in 1853, and Scott and the Reverend John Bowles Glenn encouraged the local congregation to establish the East Alabama Male College, a Methodist institution that began classes in 1859 and served as the forerunner of Auburn University.

The first settlers of Auburn met many challenges. They arrived in late 1836, survived the winter, and then encountered the Panic of 1837, a worldwide depression that severely affected Southern agriculture and lasted well into the 1840s. Not surprisingly, then, the pioneering community of Auburn began as a log village of houses and churches. However, the depression ended at last and, beginning in the late 1840s, the village enjoyed unusual prosperity until the Civil War began in 1861.

During the conflict, a blockade of Southern ports imposed severe privation on the community. Federal troops twice raided the village to destroy the railroad that served as a lifeline for the Confederate defense of Atlanta. In the summer of 1864, General Lovell Rousseau and 2,500 Federal cavalrymen tore up thirty-five miles of tracks leading to and from the village, disabled the rolling stock, and burned the depot, the post office and a large warehouse. Local slaves then joined the soldiers in looting the business district. Federal troops made a particular point of looting Pebble Hill, rented by Mrs. William Lowndes Yancey, the widow of the Fire-Eater politician who had done so much to bring about the secession of the Southern states. Although Rousseau’s horsemen did not damage local homes, a fierce tornado ripped through the community on December 27, 1864, destroyed houses, and killed five residents. The villagers regarded it a miracle that more were not killed. When the roof of the Baptist Church caved in, the high-backed pews protected the Confederate soldiers who were convalescing in the Gilmer hospital located there. (Sophie Gilmer Bibb of Montgomery organized the Hospital Association to treat wounded Confederates. Perhaps her prominent family subsidized the hospital in the church.)

Federal General James H. Wilson’s troops, several thousands in number, raided Auburn at the end of the Civil War and encamped overnight at the spring behind Pebble Hill. Although Wilson’s Raiders’ stay was brief, they took time to tear up the railroad once more and, this time, to loot private homes as well as businesses.

The Civil War devastated Auburn, leaving the community and the college destitute, and local commerce and staple crop agriculture in ruins with no source of credit to provide funds to start over. The state took over the impoverished Methodist college in 1872, but for many years provided no annual appropriations to run it. By 1888, however, the college and the town showed a few signs of returning prosperity. In that year, a Tuskegee newspaper reported that in the last twelve months, twenty new residences had been built in Auburn. Furthermore, each house cost at least $1,500, and some even cost $5,000.

Fire destroyed individual structures from time to time. According to Tuskegee newspapers, when a fire destroyed the carriage factory on the east