Deep Fried Kudzu

The NY Times runs an article about regional foods in general every so often, and this week, its lens was somewhat focused on Southern food, in Southern Farmers Vanquish the Cliches.  The article begins,
"IT’S not hard to get Emile DeFelice riled up. Just mention Paula Deen, the so-called queen of Southern food, who cooks with canned fruit and Crisco. Or say something like “You don’t look like a Southern pig farmer.” He’ll practically hit the ceiling of his Prius.


Because there are a few things about Southern food that the man just can’t stand: its hayseed image, the insiders who feed that image and the ignorant outsiders who believe in it."

---
HBO + David Milch + William Faulkner

---
New: Fallingwater iPad app.

---

In Atlanta, sheep and goats are keeping lawns and lots free of kudzu and ivy.  The company is called Ewe-niversally Green, and look at the before and after pics.


---
An interview with Sister Anne Brooks of the Delta Tutwiler Clinic.  There are two doctors in the county (pop. 15.3k).

Wilcox County in Alabama, the second-poorest county in the state, is in a similar position, with one doctor for every 4667 citizens, meaning three in this county...and two of them are nearing retirement.  The documentary, A Certain Kind, looks into their efforts to recruit health professionals here:


A Certain Kind from Carly Palmour on Vimeo.

---
Ever wondered how the interior of the Hindenburg was laid out and appointed?

---
Interesting article in the LA Times this week about Alabama's new immigration law, and its effects on Riverside Heights Baptist in Tallassee.

---
Divine Disorder, Conserving the Chaos: Conference on the Conservation of Folk and Outsider Art,
National Council for Preservation Technology and Training will take place February 15-16 at Northwestern University in Natchitoches.

---
This article about NOLA-native, B'ham-based Deedee Morrison and her Sun-Catcher solar-powered public sculpture in Clearwater, Florida -- her website has pics of her other installations including these great lanterns.  Pics of her studio here.

---
"Pure for G-d" 2000-year-old token from the Temple in Jerusalem was just announced, and likely was for the purposes of showing that an item had been approved for ritual use.

---
The Times-Picayune is asking a question for which there will be *much* discussion: who makes the best king cake?

Several years ago, there was a terrific, terrific gallery in B'ham, and the owners, who became our friends, gave us this large menorah.  This year, we put it on the front porch (those lights are from the Chanukah display we do at our home).  The boys got the biggest kick from lighting the candles this way!  We hope you and your family had a fantastic holiday -- whatever holiday you celebrate -- this year!

From the AP, in the T-P:

HOUMA, La. -- It isn't the statues, the stained glass or even the pillows on the graves at Southdown Cemetery that bother Terrebonne Councilman Alvin Tillman -- it's the colors on the tombs.


He does not like the red one, the yellow one, the soft dove gray or any of the shades of blue that about a dozen of the tombs have been painted. And he says other people have complained about it too.


"We want to stop this before it gets out of hand," Tillman said. "Before you know it you'll go out there and the cemetery will look like Mardi Gras."


Tillman wants it to be illegal to paint a tomb anything but white.

---
Maybe Alvin Tillman should invest in founding cemeteries with 'home-owners associations' full of ordinances and self-important governing boards which restrict...everything that is at odds with uniformity.

Then there wouldn't be room for sweet sentiments, like this one in a cemetery we found in Opelousas:

The Oxford Mound Builders Of The Cenozoic Era, The Quaternary Period, The Holocene Epoch: in other words, people in Oxford are fashioning what is to crudely represent an Indian mound in our days.  Right now.  2011.

And that just seems terribly fake.  Especially considering that all this began in the city's quest for fill-dirt for a shopping area (they hoped it would be a Sam's Club but that never materialized) in which the earth beneath a stone mound was taken -- see pic above.  And then remains were found across, ahem, Leon Smith Parkway, where the Davis Farm had stood, which was earlier a center of Indian life since the 12th century when various mounds were built, including a ceremonial mound.  The Davis Farm home was even built atop one of the mounds.  So when human remains were found on site...

From the AP article:

Dump trucks loaded with stones from atop a hill behind a shopping center transported their cargo to a site across Leon Smith Parkway on Thursday. The move fulfilled part of an agreement between Oxford and a federally recognized American Indian tribe — an agreement the city needed to proceed with a construction project at the site. It also represented the end of a nearly three-year-long controversy regarding the city's treatment of an alleged ancient Indian stone burial mound.

Fred Denney, Oxford's city project manager, said the transport of rocks from the hill to an adjacent site near the city's proposed sports complex was part of Oxford's memorandum of agreement with the Muscogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Alabama Historical Commission.

---
 Under the agreement, approved in June, the city had to move the stones to an undisclosed location where ancient American Indian remains were discovered last year during construction of the sports complex. At the site, the city must use the rocks to construct a mound approximately 32 meters by 16 meters by 1.6 meters.


((Really?  The idea that a *city* makes amends by building a new mound...))

---
The corps halted the sports complex project in February 2010 after the human remains were found at the site, located at the historic Davis Farms. 


---
 Once the stones are moved, the city has the go-ahead from the Muscogee Creeks to do whatever it wants with the land behind the shopping center. 


---
The city filed a $2 million lawsuit in October against the Tennessee architectural firm Barge, Waggoner, Sumner and Cannon, which designed the sports complex. The lawsuit alleges the firm was negligent and breached its contract with the city by failing to properly advise, supervise and manage the project, resulting in the discovery of the remains. It adds that the firm knew the project site was known for containing historical artifacts and that substantial engineering and technical advice in site preparation would be required.


((*Love* this whole last paragraph.))

The LA Times' most-viewed home galleries of 2011 includes the Eames home, which is presently, partly, on display at the Los Angeles County Museum.

---
Krispy Kreme has an app now to let you know when the 'hot' light is on at any of their shops you choose.  And Randazzo's has a king cake app now, too.

---
George Rodrigue's Blue Dog as victim.  In New Orleans, of course.

---
Can you believe this has had $5MM in sales?

---
A few years ago, I walked into a country store in Mississippi that had a hand-written notice next to the cash register letting people know that there was a several-thousand-dollar reward if anyone found and took a picture of (but certainly not killed) an ivory-billed woodpecker.  Since then, it's the one bird I've been interested in, as it's widely believed to be extinct.  Ira Flatow's Science Friday on NPR did a piece today on the ivory-billed's cousin, the Imperial woodpecker.  And it's interesting.

---

The Blue Willow Inn, in Social Circle, closed temporarily this week after an outbreak of customers getting sick...  The writer at Atlanta's CL has it right:
...the place has received much national press over the years, probably less for the quality of the cooking, which is respectable but fairly standard, than for the antebellum setting and a series of grand dining rooms that seek to transport the diner to a more genteel, bygone era. There are only a handful of spots in Georgia serving rustic, all-you can eat Southern fare to the masses — the Smith House and Dillard House are the first that come to mind — but the Blue Willow has the most fancy-pants decor and manners. And it's the closest to Atlanta, making it a perfect place to take grandparents from out of town.

---
The WSJ has a nice year-end mention of the Thornton Dial show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art:
Two decades of relief paintings, free-standing sculptures and drawings attested to Mr. Dial's power. Their titles asserted deep convictions about ecology, civil rights, the role of women, and politics; their quirky materiality declared their affinity with the oddball objects in Southern "yard shows," but no special pleading was required for the art or its author. Whatever the works' lineage or motivations, whatever Mr. Dial's history, "Hard Truths" was an impressive survey of first-rate works by a major artist. Period.

---
Tales of the Toddy, the first-ever Bourbon Spiked Eggnog Competition in New Orleans, with recipes.

---
Turducken burger at Flip.

---
Salvation Mountain update.

These are pics that Av and Leslie and I made in 2002 when we visited the covered bridges in Blount County, Alabama (I was playing around with b&w film).  The most impressive one is this one, Swann Bridge, built in 1933 -- it's the it's the longest, at 300+', of all the surviving covered bridges in the state.



All the covered bridges in the county have been closed for a couple of years, and restoration has just begun.

With the decking up, what is truly remarkable is that there is virtually no rot or decay on unpainted wood that has spanned the river for almost 80 years. Friedberg said that the heart pine wood they used came from trees that had grown slowly for hundreds of years. To get wood that is comparable, the company will have to special order it and have it treated.

"You can't just go to Lowe's and get this type of wood," he said.

In downtown Florence...

2011 would have been the 100th birthday of Tennessee Williams -- above is a pic I took of the first home he lived in, in Columbus, Mississippi.  In the NYT article about it, the first paragraph is this:

“DO you know what Spring Pilgrimage is?” asked Brenda Caradine, the chairwoman of the Tennessee Williams Birthday Celebration in Columbus, Miss. “It’s when you Yankees come down South to see our antebellum homes and we take back your money.”

...and the last paragraph is this:

“The entire country still needs Tennessee Williams as a voice for kindness,” said William Gantt, director of the Southern Literary Trail. “His work continues to champion outcasts, and his compassion for them will make him relevant forever.”

Tennessee Williams lived in Mississippi until he was seven, when his father got a job in St. Louis.

His obit in the NYT read in part, "He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart."


---
'A Streetcar Named Desire' will be 65 in 2012, and Warner Brothers will be releasing the movie on blu-ray including with three minutes of film that was thought lost until the '90s "that had been trimmed from the film at the insistence of the National League of Decency and to avoid running afoul of the Hollywood Production Code."  This version will also include "five documentaries, commentary tracks, Brando's screen test, a Kazan movie trailer gallery, and a 40-page booklet."


---
In 2005 I went to Benoit, Mississippi and photographed the Baby Doll house where the film, based on his Twenty-Seven Loads of Cotton play, looked like this:


It has since been restored and (wonderfully) looks like this today.

I made eggnog fudge last week -- wonderful!  One of the big plusses about this recipe is that with white chocolate added, it stays nice and white after cooking (sometimes without it, eggnog fudge can start to look a little darker in the pan) and of course has that nice flavor.  I wasn't sure about adding marshmallow creme because that seemed like cheating somehow, but with all that chocolate it was sure to lighten up the density.  Oh, and pecans added a nice bite.  This is an amalgamation of several different recipes I consulted:

Makes an 8x8 pan -- 40-48 pieces
Ingredients:
3/4 cup eggnog
1/2 cup butter
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cup white chocolate morsels
1 7oz jar jar marshmallow creme
2 cups chopped pecans

Cooking Directions:
Prepare an 8x8" baking dish with buttered parchment paper, or tin foil.

Stir together constantly the butter, eggnog, and sugar with a wooden spoon, and bring it up to a boil with a candy thermometer inserted in the pan (this is a perfect job for a heavy Le Creuset pan).

Take the mixture off the heat once the mixture reaches 238* which is soft ball, or fudge, stage.

Now that the pan is off the heat, immediately add the white chocolate, marshmallow creme, and pecans.  Stir very well.  Once the chocolate has melted and everything is very well incorporated, pour into the prepared baking dish, then set that aside to cool.  Once it reaches room temperature, you can put it in the refrigerator to finish setting.  Cut into small pieces as this is really rich.

---
For this recipe I used our traditional brand, Barber's -- but I also bought a container of egg nog by Southern Comfort (which is not listed on their website, but it has a FB page)

The Frank Lloyd Wright home, built for Kenneth Laurent in Rockford, IL (it was the only fully-functional handicapped home FLW ever designed) sold this week for $578,500 to the only bid at auction, by the Laurent House Foundation Board, which has plans to turn it into a museum.

---
The Atlantic found a little story about a young man who wrote to Nelle Harper Lee in 2006 asking for a photo; instead she wrote him a short note of advice:
"As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, “I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.”

---
Last week I mentioned that Leonard Knight, the visionary artist behind Salvation Mountain, was taken to long-term care. If you know Leonard and would like to write (no visits right now), the address is Eldorado Care Center, 510 E. Washington, El Cajon CA 92020. Sadly, Leonard's caretaker, Kevin Eubank, passed away this week. Kevin's last video, updating everyone on Leonard, is here. Sad, sad, sad.

---
Honeysuckle Southern Inspired Gelato in Atlanta makes some of the most wonderful-sounding signature flavors: Moon Pie, the Kang (toasted banana ice cream with ribbons of peanut butter caramel), Mint Julep, and staple flavors: peanut brittle, divinity, sorghum, bourbon, rum raisin, bourbon pecan, and sweet tea. Oh yes!

---
Scott Peacock's holiday menu (which I found via Google, had no idea he was doing features for BHG) here.

---
The Washington Post's slideshow of Gehry's Eisenhower monument in Washington.  Article here.

---
The growing olive oil industry in Georgia.

My friend Cindy always puts on the very nicest Christmas parties!  This year, not only did we get together for our usual fun (and a terrific cookie swap -- I made my pistachio and cherry Mexican wedding cakes -- everything everyone else made was fantastic as always but one of the really fun things was white chocolate peppermint popcorn balls) but we did a craft -- Christmas trees!  All the girls made Christmas trees for their homes, and...well, since we're Jewish...I made a forest tree with moss at the base and super-snuggly warm yarn at the top.

I think these are the ones Cindy and Darlene made:


It's just a styrofoam cone, glue or straight pens to keep everything held onto the cone, and yarn:


...and here are all our trees! Mine's on the second row with the moss at the base -- loooved the moss, but it made the biggest, shaggiest mess everywhere when I was putting it on.  My favorite is the lighter green one with the pom-poms on the same step, but really they all turned out so great!!

At Barbara Lee Black's gallery window:


You kinda have to know Amos Kennedy...this is in his studio window:

The very well-received documentary about Amos, Proceed and Be Bold, is here.

Each year, he's at Kentuck selling posters and teaching letterpress:




Below, Amos and Shug a couple of years ago, in Glenn House's gallery -- and Glenn, who is crazy-talented, is really to thank for making Gordo into such a place so welcoming for artists.

I could go on forever about Glenn and bookarts, and letterpress in general, and all the other things he does, but there's just no way not to love what he does in neon:

Studio 150 is next to Amos Kennedy's studio:


The artist-in-residence at Studio 150 this summer...


...and this was on the door.

I've made these as gifts for friends, and sold them to people who've asked for them...these make great baby gifts for Chanukah -- and if you don't celebrate Chanukah, you just put the letters together for a nice new-baby present that can be displayed on a shelf.  From making so many of these, here are some tips...

You'll need:
Alphabet blocks
Gorilla wood glue
Candle cups (if you're making a menorah)
Hot glue, hot glue gun


You can get alphabet blocks at any general merchandise shop (Target, etc)...and I used those early on -- but the nicest blocks are made by Lindenwood / Uncle Goose brand, and they are made entirely in Michigan using American ink.  Lindenwood makes different language blocks, and when I do a menorah using the baby's Hebrew name, I use their Hebrew blocks.  Look at how gorgeous those Chinese blocks are, too!

Now, you can even purchase the individual blocks from them if you want just enough to make a particular name, etc.  And how fantastic are the braille blocks!?  And since I'm not obviously not done extolling the virtues of these fantastic blocks, the Presidential blocks, the heiroglyphic blocks, and the elemental blocks are all pretty wonderful too.

Gorilla glue can be gotten at any hardware store.

If you're making a menorah, the DIY/crafty version is to use hardware bolts.  The nice way is to use candle cups like these.

There's really no trick -- Gorilla glue sets of three candles together, and clamp overnight, then the next day glue more on until you have the complete set done.  Remember if you're making a menorah to glue an extra block on top of either the middle or the last block so that you have a shamash.  Then hot-glue on your nine candle cups (if you are putting the shamash on an end, put an extra block that will not have a candle cup on it *before* your shamash so there's not one of the eight candles with flames so close to the base of your shamash candle -- see the pic above).


 If you decide to put the shamash in the middle of your menorah, think about gluing on a glass pebble so that middle candle will be higher.

One of my favorite paintings at the Mississippi Museum of Art:

Carroll Cloar's Kudzu, painted in 1976.  He was just fantastic, and this summer, Memphis Magazine reprinted an article they did on him back in the early '90s.

The NYT Sunday Review runs an editorial, 'Of Poor Farmers and 'Famous Men'' wherein the NYT author again visits Hale county.

And yet their faces show they were clearly and utterly defenseless. The book imposed a strange and unwanted fame on Hale County, where many saw its unflinching depiction of poverty as exploitive and cruel. That is what makes the descendants there still so angry, quick to vent their frustration on the occasional reporter who arrives asking for names and directions.


---

Alabama Football Saved My Life! -- a documentary to be funded via Kickstarter. I can't help but think that the $2000 level donation would make someone a wonderful present.

---
The Bottle Tree Ranch in California has a feature in the LA Times, with slideshow.

---
An article on Kathryn Tucker Windham in this month's B'ham Magazine.

---
Frank Gehry collection at Tiffany.
...and conversely, Dept. 56 introduces Chick-Fil-A.

---

Treme Creole Gumbo Festival this weekend.

---
Langston Hughes wrote 'Black Nativity' with gospel music.  It's being performed in New Orleans -- and there's a fantastic interview about it on WWNO.

---
The WPA post office mural in Tuscumbia will be back up in 2012 following a renovation.

---
Sweet-sweet Leonard Knight, who created Salvation Mountain in California, is in the hospital.

---
Lucky's on James Island, Charleston -- pimento cheese broiled oysters.

---

Later this month, PBS' American Masters series will show "Charles and Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter"

---
Kodak Brownie nightlight.

---
Half the walls in my home are painted in the same colors as Restoration Hardware, which really pales in comparison to the fact that you can now paint the walls of your home in the very same hues that the Guggenheim uses.  Really:
For more than 50 years the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has selected the perfect wall colors to complement the celebrated collection of modern art showcased in its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home on Fifth Avenue.

Now through an exclusive licensing arrangement with Fine Paints of Europe, Inc., of Woodstock, Vermont the Guggenheim shares these trade secrets with homeowners, interior designers, architects, and art lovers everywhere.

---
The James Beard people say the new hot pastry item are Canelés.  And to make those, you need this unless you want to go silicone.  But French copper is really so much more...wonderful...

Oh, and they think doughnuts are about to take off, too.

Have you made your first (only?) (not going to?) fruitcake of the year? Because this is the part where I mention that now is the time to forget things like bricks from the grocery store studded with alien green candied cherries -- and instead consider making your own (like the crazy-great glorious fruitcake cupcakes, like I made above) with things that are truly delicious like pecans, pineapple, golden raisins...chocolate...I can go on...

Oh, yes.

The first New Urbanism project -- anywhere -- is sometimes considered to be the Cotton District in Starkville, Mississippi as its development began in the '60s.  These are pics we took from our visit this summer.  I really thought the first New Urbanism community was Seaside but...

When Dan Camp, the developer, was invited to speak at the Congress of New Urbanism annual convention this summer, he was described as a Renaissance Man:

Buildings close to the street, sidewalks, picket fences, and concealed vehicles all contribute to the unique community of The Cotton District located in Starkville, Mississippi. Boasting a twenty-eight person per acre population, The Cotton District portrays the ideals of "new urbanism" as developed by Dan Camp, community visionary. Now the hottest real estate in Starkville, The Cotton District was once one of the most deplorable areas of this Northern Mississippi town. In 1972, Camp began developing and constructing a student-centered community to house students of Mississippi State University. What began as eight apartments have blossomed into a whole community including retail spaces, restaurants, and living quarters that over four hundred people call home.

After graduating from Mississippi State University in 1962, Dan taught Industrial Arts in the Mississippi public school system and returned to Starkville to teach at Mississippi State in the Department of Industrial Education in 1966. Dan served on the Starkville Public School Board for fifteen years and was chairman three times. During the spring of 1987, Dan and his wife Gemma recognized local artists and musicians in their home. From a small gathering of people this event has grown into the Cotton District Arts Festival attracting over 12,000 people to Starkville each April.

Dan served as mayor of Starkville from 2005-2009 and took his ideas about community development from his neighborhood of the Cotton District to the entire city. Examples of specific accomplishments are: new Park and Recreation facilities, during his term the City of Starkville was recognized as one of 40 cities nationwide for the distinction of a “Smart growth city” by the EPA, adopted the State of Mississippi's first sustainability policy to promote “green” development for the city’s future and requiring LEED certification for any public building in excess of 3,000 square feet, centering the electric department building in a blighted area of down town to help revitalize the area, the city became the first non-smoking community in Mississippi, the addition of cold beer to the community, adding bike lanes to the City of Starkville, established the first community dog park in Mississippi.

Dan has been recognized for his development through multiple publications and was awarded the first Arthur Ross Award for Community Design by Classical America. He has spoken at numerous Smart Growth and Community Development Conferences where he has shared his experience with others.

...found in downtown Bessemer, Alabama.

Queen City Park in Tuscaloosa, which has a lot of art deco style -- the architect was Don Buel Schuyler -- was built, and dedicated in 1943 thanks to the WPA and the Civil Works Administration, with additional funds from the David Warner Foundation.  If you're familiar with Tuscaloosa then the Warner name will likely be very familiar, as that's the family who, among other things, was the Gulf States Paper Co and gardens on site.  In 1960, Jack Warner "commissioned architect Cecil Alexander to model Gulf States Paper's new corporate headquarters after an eleventh-century palace in Japan, complete with an interior garden inhabited by peacocks and black-necked swans."  More about that later.

This article is about the Queen City Trails.




About the pool, at which this fountain (above) was at the head, it was written almost ten years ago that the "Friends of Queen City Park would like to see it filled to about the two-foot level and turned into a reflecting pool with flower gardens and paths over much of it....A plan commissioned by the city two years ago called for a garden and path over half of the pool and a small therapy pool on the other half."


This is the bath house designed by Don Buel Schuyler:


It's slated to become the Mildred Warner Westervelt Transportation Museum -- it was written in October that it's behind schedule to open because "Officials say the setbacks can be attributed mostly to bad luck. Plans to use the original flooring of the former Queen City Bathhouse were scrapped after construction efforts caused too much damage and the floor needed to be replaced.  Then, earlier this year, the original contractor on the project went bankrupt, which then caused delays in completing the $1.53 million in renovations and upgrades."

What's most interesting in all this is how the Warners have stayed close to this property, and the family's art collection (which has undergone a great upheaval this year -- while many important pieces have left Tuscaloosa, a collection remains as the new Tuscaloosa Museum of Art).  And for an idea of what the Warners collect, absolutely see this (paneled walls from an English castle were brought to Jack's home in Tuscaloosa, for one).

Frank Lloyd Wright's only adobe house, which is fittingly in Santa Fe, is on the market at $4.75MM.

---
James Agee's article for Fortune Magazine, Cotton Tenants: Three Families, was rejected by the publisher.  It ultimately led to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Coming in March 2012, the article will be available in The Baffler journal.

---
John Kessler's review of Southern Art and Bourbon Bar in at the InterContinental in Buckhead appears in the AJC -- he calls it a 'Southern restaurant' as he puts it, in 'air quotes looming large'.


The turducken of cheese balls.

---
One of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'bootleg' homes (he designed them 'on the side' -- in violation of his contract with the firm he was with) is on the market for $1.4MM in La Grange, IL.

---
The only daughter of Joseph Stalin, Svetlana, died last week in Wisconsin.  She met her husband, Wes Peters, at FLW's firm, when she was invited there by FLW's Russian wife.  Her husband was an architect there.

---
For me, the only doughnut is a yeast-based doughnut, but Krispy Kreme has come out with a red velvet cake doughnut.  Which gives me pause.  Oh -- and that red velvet cake ice cream is *sooooo* good!  The AP just ran a little piece with a recipe for red velvet cookies.

---
Martha Hawkins, owner of Martha's Place (and author of Finding Martha's Place: My Journey through Sin, Salvation, and lots of Soul Food), says she is going to reopen her restaurant in a shopping center on Atlanta Highway.  Yay!  The Blue Moon Inn cookbook (it was a restaurant in M'ry that closed a long time ago) is also issuing a new edition.  Southern Living reprinted their recipe for pimento cheese here.

---
In Australia, the Sydney Morning News readers were asked what their favorite books were.  First place: To Kill A Mockingbird.  Lots of extras on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the TKAM film on DVD and Blu-Ray.

---
My beautiful, bottle-tree-making friend Stephanie Dwyer is in a commercial for the Chimneyville Crafts Festival this weekend in Jackson.  It is always a fantastic show.

---
Beeswax mason jars.

One of my favorite homes in Tuscaloosa is the Drish House at 2300 17th St - it was built in 1837 by Dr. John Drish, and he remodeled it in the 1850s by adding the tower and columns.  It was the center home of a several hundred-acre plantation, and it's believed that the architect was William Nichols.

William Nichols is famous on his own -- he was born in England and came to the US in 1800, and became the state architect of North Carolina in 1818.  He moved to Alabama in 1827 when he was commissioned to become Alabama's state architect and thus design the capitol at Tuscaloosa.  He also designed buildings to make up the University of Alabama, and every one of them except one were burned to the ground by the Union Army in 1865.  His rotunda in the center of campus, pictured below, were among those lost:

(This image is pre-1923, so it is in the public domain.)  Nichols went on to Mississippi and designed the old state capitol building and the Lyceum at Ole Miss, besides other projects.

After the turn of the century, the Drish home was turned into a school, then 'Tuscaloosa Wrecking Company' which Walker Evans photographed and made famous.  Later Southside Baptist bought the home, adding their own building to the side, which has now been demolished.  The Drish home alone remains.

Image from LOC, Reproduction Number: LC-USF342-T01-008252-A

It was put on the state's Places in Peril list about five years ago.



It is said that Dr. Drish had night terrors, and during one episode ran from his bedroom and fell off a banister in the home to his death.  His wife grieved terribly.  The ghost story is in Kathryn Tucker Windham's first '13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey' book.


(This image is pre-1923, so it is in the public domain.)  This is how the home appeared in 1905.