By DONNA THORNTON, Editor
A settlement developed on the plateau of Sand Mountain around the middle of the 1800s, and after a few decades – 135 years ago today – it was incorporated as a city on Feb. 18, 1891.
The Albertville Museum will celebrate this anniversary today with a come-and-go cake-and-punch party which will give residents and visitors a chance to see artifacts and exhibits that record much of the city’s 135 year history.
“We have photos that go back even farther,” Museum Executive Director Chelsea Harris said Saturday, at a private event at the museum.
The Daughters of the American Revolution Heroes of Kings Mountain Chapter met at the museum, to hear from and to recognize museum board member Danny Maltbie, one of those who has devoted time and effort to maintaining the history of the region.
The chapter’s Regent Ellie Brown presented Maltbie with a certificate of recognition for his service.
Maltbie spoke to the chapter members about the history of the city and the museum, which got its start in 2011 at a location on West Main Street, in a little church building that was about half the size of one room of the current museum. There was no room there for storage and there was no visibility for the facility. Maltbie recalled telling people he was with the museum then. “They’d say ‘what museum?’”
Maltbie joined the board in 2013. He said he kept going to city hall and asking for storage space because the museum was “overrun” with material.
Mayor Tracey Honea recognized both needs, and helped secure the current building, at 101 West Main Street. The upstairs part of the building, Maltbie said, was a funeral home. “But funeral homes were different then,” he said. The dead were brought in and prepared and then taken home for visitations.
“This building was built in 1909,” Maltbie said, and the adjacent building – the original bank building – was built in 1904 when Hogan Jackson moved to Albertville and bought the property, building the structure and starting what proved to be a very profitable bank.
The property he bought was part of a block of land owned by the Emmett family, who moved to Albertville in 1881. “Mr. Emmett built the first store, general merchandise, right here on the corner where the bank was,” Maltbie said. It was an L-shaped building stretching in both directions from the corner.
While the Emmett family can’t be credited with starting the town, he said they started the growth of the city that would become Albertville.
“He built the church down here, on West Main near the church were we were,” Maltbie said.
The Emmett family came from the same county in Georgia that Maltbie’s ancestors came from. A lot of the people who came to settle in the north part of Alabama came from the same area of north Georgia, he said, and there’s a reason for that.
“During the Creek War of 1812, the Native Americans, the Cherokee that lived around Guntersville, after the war they wanted a road built to north Georgia,” he said, adding that the road was a contributing cause for the conflict. Some wanted it; some didn’t.
“But that road is the old Georgia Road, and that’s the reason for that migration from that part of Georgia to here,” Maltbie said. “The rest of the town didn’t start growing until around 1900.
“The railroad came in 1892. That opened us up to the outside world and the outside world to us,” Maltbie said. Cotton was the top crop at the time, he said, the primary driver of the economy until the poultry industry came in, and of course, fire hydrant maker for the world Mueller.
“We had urban renewal in the 1970s,” he said. “What they did, they turned the downtown area into a pedestrian mall and did away with what they called blight. Well, they did away with cotton warehouses, pretty much.”
He had praise for Albertville’s current mayor, Tracy Honea, saying he’s done more for Albertville than many mayors in its history. “Some of them didn’t do anything. Some of them did things to hurt,” he said.
“You can see the growth we’ve got going on,” Maltbie said, “and it’s going to be part of our history some day.”
The Daughters of the American Revolution Heroes of Kings Mountain Chapter presented Albertville Museum boardmember Danny Maltbie with a certificate recognizing his work in preserving local history. Pictured from left: Albertville Mayor Tracy Honea, Maltbie, Regent Ellie Brown and Vice Regent Lorie Biddle. Photo by DONNA THORNTON l The Leader
