I Still Dream About You

Crestview Begins

IN 1862, WHEN IT WAS DISCOVERED THAT THE RED DUST THAT kicked up around wagon wheels on the mountain was not dust but iron ore ground to a fine powder, word spread, and an entire industry began.

Birmingham had been named after the great iron-producing city of the same name in England. Many of Birmingham’s early founders had arrived in Alabama with images of London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, which they had left behind, still shining in their mind’s eye, and they had determined to build something in America to match or even surpass those grand cities.

Angus Crocker was such a man. In 1885, straight from Edinburgh, Scotland, he rode in horse and buggy all the way up to the top of Red Mountain and looked into the valley below and declared to his son, Edward, “Someday, a great city will be built down there.” An architect was hired, and six months later, on that very spot, construction on Angus Crocker’s house began. He sent home to Europe for the finest stonemasons and workmen he could find, and all the materials: each stone, every brick, every plank of wood had been handpicked and shipped from his beloved Scotland. Although he was known to be tightfisted in business affairs, no expense was spared when it came to the building of his house. Two years later, after construction was completed, his foreman from Perthshire proudly handed Angus the key and declared, “There ye have it, sir, the finest of Scotland, your home on the crest of the mountain with a view to rival no man’s.” From that day forward, the house was called Crestview, and the name was engraved in stone over the archway of the front door. Carved underneath in smaller letters was the phrase THIRLED NO MORE.

After the house had been furnished and the grounds and gardens completed, Crestview had its formal opening. As it was the first of the grand homes to be built on the mountain, the event was covered by the New Age-Herald.

A ASTLE IN THE SKY

June 18, 1887-As Scottish bagpipers piped us up the long driveway, Birmingham industrialist Angus Crocker, with young son Edward at his side, welcomed us to his newly completed castle in the sky atop Red Mountain. After a short ribbon-cutting ceremony by the mayor, an awestruck crowd was given a complete tour of the home and gardens. “Perfection” is an oft overused word; however, all others fail this reporter. In this modern age of slipshod, thrown-together, lean-to affairs jumping up all over town, passing as houses, while style, workmanship, and aesthetics have been left behind to serve the new twin masters of the building trade, cheap and speedy, Crestview now stands above our city: a proud symbol of what is good and noble in the human spirit, a tribute to the might of the individual to create beauty out of stone and mortar, a beacon of light shining high on a hill, beckoning and welcoming all who view her to move up the mountain, giving us all an ideal to strive for.

The reporter, still feeling the effects of the imported scotch whiskey that had been served that afternoon, may have overstated the case, but others who had attended the celebration agreed that Crestview was not only beautiful but also well built. “This house will stand a thousand years,” said one man who knew about construction.

After Crestview went up, when all the other successful men began building their homes, they, too, brought in architects with instructions to “do me something English.” Residential areas were laid out, shade trees were planted, and streets were given names such as Essex, Carlyle, Sterling, Glenview, and Hanover Circle; imported English lampposts with round yellow globes lined each sidewalk. Soon hundreds of large limestone, red brick, and Tudor-style homes with long winding driveways were built, and charming little shopping villages-Crestline, Mountain Brook, Homewood, and English Village-popped up, with small, elegant shops that offered furniture, silver, linens, and fine china brought from London or the Cotswolds.

Every afternoon, from the day his house was completed, Angus Crocker sat out on his large stone terrace and looked down in the valley below and watched the long, wide avenues of downtown Birmingham being laid out. The city grew not gradually but in leaps and bounds. Every day, buildings climbed higher and higher until what was once a huge dark wooded area had become peppered with new houses and streets that stretched as far as the eye could see. From his terrace, he looked across the valley at the towering smokestacks of the iron and steel mills that surrounded the city, billowing thick orange smoke all the way up to Tennessee and beyond. He had seen a magic city rise up out of nothing to become the great modern industrial center of the South.

Angus had no art in his home. His art was the outline of the buildings of the city against the sky, the red and orange streaks of iron ore in the mountains, and the glowing red-hot rivers of iron and steel that ran through his mills day and night. There was no piano in the living room. The pulse and the pounding of the steam engines, iron banging on iron, steel on steel; the sound of the train whistles in the night as they pulled in and out of the downtown terminal with boxcars loaded with coal and pig iron; this was the only music Angus Crocker liked to hear.

On these nights, Angus wished his father and his grandfathers before him could know that, at last, a Crocker had climbed out of the cold, dirty coal mines and had thrown off the brass collar of serfdom forever; that a Crocker had climbed to the top of the mountain and built a castle in the sky as a monument to all their years of hard work and as a tribute to the country where a man with nothing but a dream could succeed even beyond his wildest dreams.

Perhaps in the eyes of others, what he had done to achieve it could be considered a terrible thing. But unlike his ancestors, who had left nothing behind, he had something tangible, something real to leave to Edward, his only child: a great booming city he had helped form, a vast fortune, and a name to be proud of. And no matter the dust and grime below, the air was always clean and fresh atop Red Mountain.