Local History

Shel Silverstein came to my elementary school classroom via my son,  the year I became a public school teacher in 1980 and Ray went to the University of Alabama as a freshman.  Ray and I were both poetry lovers, but Where the Sidewalk Ends was a different...

The Magic of Marble Festival 2022 is over, but the magic of marble in Sylacauga remains with us in the number of jobs the industry provides as well as the beautiful art treasures that make Sylacauga such a unique place. This was the 14th annual event sponsored by the...

One of my favorite books, When God Winks at You, was written by Squire Rushnell, a former television president and CEO with ABC. It is packed with interesting accounts of how God speaks directly to you day-to-day through events that first seem to be coincidences. Such...

Old time-religion Baptists like to say that the faith that falters was faulty from the first because Jesus Christ changes everything. This is the story of Nora Pearl Minter Culberson and Albert Rufus Culberson who met one day at an all-day gospel singing at the Odena...

Many people, including this writer, are in love with a. town that never existed, a town where Andy, Barney, Opie, Aunt Bea, Comer, and Goober lived and worked and helped each other through the ups and downs of small town living. (We can say with pride that two of...

The story of what happened at the old Rec Building is a strange one that I did not know until I read The Story of the Sylacauga Recreation Building by Beth Yates. As previously reported, that building which opened in 1942 was built to be temporary and last for ten...

Sylacauga’s recreation program was established as a multi-faceted program that had something for everyone. It started on level ground with other nearby programs since it was a part of a federal project in 194l that funded similar buildings in Childersburg and...

The Sylacauga Recreation Building is strategically located near both B.B. Comer and Sylacauga High Schools. Soon after it opened in February 1942, almost eighty years ago, it became a gathering place for students from both schools in the afternoons and evenings, and...

The grand opening of the Federal Community Building was held on February 10, 1942, almost eighty years ago. This area had a problem, and the facility was built to have a place to solve the problem. We all know that, no matter how big, beautiful, and state of the art,...

Bowl games have always been an exciting part of college football; but from this woman’s point of view, they are a little ho-hum now with the football championship playoff games taking center stage. Still the “our best against your best” of bowl games and parades...

Christmas is love. It is an event, not a feeling. God sent His Son to the world so that we might know Him, who is, was, and evermore shall be. He is God in human flesh, come as a little baby in an insignificant little town prophesied years before as the place of His...

I was researching when I found an interesting article in the Sylacauga Advance of February 3, 1949, that shows differences in the way our city leaders worked together back in that day and today. As Barney Fife put it, my twig is not bent toward politics; but I think...

Sometimes remembering is a warm, fuzzy feeling, but remembering can be painful. Consumers today are seeing the effects of a shortage of truckers in empty shelves. Government regulation, rising gas prices, and people’s misconceptions about the trucking industry have...

It was a different time when I was growing up in the fifties.  Moms left home to work because of necessity in World War II, but the war was over and prosperity had begun to settle over small communities across this land, towns like Sylacauga. In the days of the “Leave...

Horace and Doris Farris Everywhere I go I am looking for a little bit of “nice.” I remember a kinder, gentler, time when people treated each other with respect and did small acts of kindness with no expectation of reward or even thanks. There is an old saying, “You...

B.B. Comer Memorial High School I have always  been interested in schools of yesteryear and how they evolved into such different places as time rolls on. From Miss Beadle’s school in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books, to any book I see about...

These words were repeated countless times  by wives and mamas and husbands and daddies of long ago.  The neighborhood Mom and Pop Grocery was not far away from the family’s house, but in one car families or no car families going to town to shop was only...

Grocery stores have always been about products (supply and demand), people, and service. The mom and pop stores of the past provided the things that people could not raise on the farm, and they raised just about everything. People even did spinning and weaving at...