My excitement mounted as I waited on the curb, a pair of roller skates and a small box of clothes on the grass next to me. Would the blue 1937 Plymouth ever turn the corner off Main Street onto Shelby Street to pick me up for a weekend at Montebrier, a large home sitting on Mahan Creek, just a few miles down below Montevallo in Brierfield? Mr. and Mrs. Bill Pittman, the owners of Montebrier, had called from Birmingham before starting the two-hour drive to Montevallo so I had a rough idea as to when they would arrive, but well in advance I stationed myself on the curb. Between the ages of eight and eleven I would replay this excited anticipation time and time again, particularly in the summer. Little did I know then that one day I would own the place and live in it.
From Mr. Pittman I learned the history of this interesting house. Montebrier was built in 1866 as a private residence, but in 1929, Dick Yount, who built Palmer, Bloch, Wills, and Ramsay halls on the Montevallo campus, bought it and turned it into a country club. That didn’t last long, however, because Yount lost Montebrier in the crash of ’29. It fell into the hands of Merchants and Planters Bank, and they leased it for dances and parties from 1929–35. The Bama Skippers Band, made up of Eddie, Charles, and Mary Lee Mahaffey and a couple of surgeons from Birmingham, played there regularly.
Dad loved Montebrier. He often called square dances there, and he also danced with the Frederick girls, who were well known for their dancing skills. When I was a baby, he took my sisters down there to dance.
Ads appeared in the Montevallo and Centreville papers announcing dances and other events at the Montebrier Club. However, open dances were short-lived due to the rowdiness of attendees.
The Bama Skippers, a famous local band, seated on the front steps of the Montebrier Club about 1929.
For a number of years, Montebrier was a gambling haven. When Sam Klotzman was a young man, he won a T-model Ford with one cast of the dice, but little good did it do him. In those days, one had to ford Mahan Creek to get to Montebrier, and while Sam and others were playing, Jaybird Rutledge, a black man who lived on the property and had worked for Yount, came in and said the creek was rising and anybody who wanted to get out better get out right away. Sam decided he better get his new car out, but, when he drove into the creek, water got into the magneto, killing the engine. The creek kept rising and the water got into the engine, ruining the car. Sam sold it for next to nothing.
John Steelman was a man of many interests and even dabbled in raising wolves for a while at Brierfield.
Along with her husband John, Mrs. Jean Steelman, an English professor at Alabama College, bought Montebrier from the bank in 1936 and lived there, even though it was not ideal for a family. It had a forty-five-foot square ballroom, a little kitchen, a dining room, and two back rooms. The Steelmans closed in a back porch for a kitchen.
The Steelmans did not live in Montebrier for very long. When Frances Perkins of the Department of Labor came to Montevallo to speak, she met Mr. Steelman and was impressed with him. She invited him to Washington as a secretary. He jumped at the chance, but Miss Jean would not go, remaining in Montevallo with an adopted daughter. A divorce followed, and Miss Jean got Montebrier in the settlement. Later she married Mr. Pittman and moved to Birmingham, but they kept Montebrier as a weekend getaway.
Mr. Pittman absolutely fell in love with Montebrier, and he came there as often as he could. He was dean of Massey Business College in Birmingham, and, though gas was rationed during the time he came there, he was able to get extra gas stickers because of his position. Mother and Dad had befriended Miss Jean during her divorce, so they became friends with Mr. Pittman, and because of that I became a frequent weekend visitor at Montebrier. It was my favorite place in the world. And because the Pittmans had no children, I became like an adopted son. I called Mr. Pittman by the simple name of Mister rather than Mr. Pittman or Mr. Bill.
When the Pittmans’ car arrived on Shelby Street, I would grab up my box, open the back door, and jump in, kneeling on the floor behind the front seat. “Hello, Mister,” I would say, because it was Mr. Pittman I was so crazy about. This six-foot-two man had gray hair combed straight back on both sides, but he didn’t seem old to me. He always wore a blue and white seersucker suit and a bow tie in the summer, and you never saw him without his pipe. He kept a pouch of Old Northern tobacco in his shirt pocket, and he had a fine metal instrument to tamp down the tobacco with or to scrape the pipe out. With Mister, pipe smoking was a high art.
Miss Jean was not so interesting to me, but I was always cordial to her. She talked incessantly, mainly about Birmingham people I did not know, and to tell the truth she bored me to death. But I could stand it. She was a tiny woman, especially looking that way as she sat next to her gigantic husband in the Plymouth. People always said that Miss Jean was attractive, but Mister was the main attraction as far as I was concerned.
“Got to go by the store first,” Mister would say, and that meant a trip to Jeter’s Mercantile to get groceries and to McCulley’s Store, where Mister had his meat specially cut by Joe Doyle. We always ate well at Montebrier.
Then we would hit the road in the big blue Plymouth, complete with fenders and running board. Mister always drove with his left arm out the window, and he always had the wing window opened to blow on him. Miss Jean also had her wing window blowing on her. The smoke from Mister’s pipe constantly blew in my face, but I didn’t care. I would peer out the front window through the space between the front seats, but what intrigued me most was the radio. In the middle of its circular dial was an orange button with a needle, which you rotated to tune in the radio. I’d ask Mr. to turn on the radio and, even though he knew we were not likely to find anything, he’d humor me. All we ever got was a shrill whee-oh-eeh-oh-eeh, but I liked that sound for some reason. I felt like real dude riding down the road in a car with a radio, even if it didn’t play. Mother and Dad didn’t even have a car at that time.
After we passed through Wilton, we turned onto the dirt road that took us to Montebrier. When we arrived, we all got out and proceeded to the padlocked front door. Once we were inside, Mister opened all the windows and then went out to open the shutters. I got my box of clothes and my skates from the car, and I looked forward to skating in the huge ballroom. I took my things to the small bedroom they put me in, just right next to theirs. It was in this room that I first heard bed springs creaking and moans coming from the couple, and I knew something was up, though I was not altogether sure what.
After getting the house opened up, Mister would get his Winchester Model 61 pump and go out in the front yard. I would watch him lift it to his shoulder and fire it up into the sky. Then we would get real still and listen. In a minute or so, we heard another gunshot from across the Mahan Creek, which ran near the house. We knew then that the nearest neighbor, Great Aunt Adelaide, was aware that we had arrived. Shortly thereafter, we would walk down to the creek, and she would walk down from her house on the other side. Then she and Mister would chat with each other from across the creek—a creek named for my ancestors. Sometimes Mister would bring Adelaide fruit that she couldn’t get in Brierfield or Montevallo.
On our weekends at Montebrier, I got a good education from Mister. I was easy with him from the start, even standing by his side as we pissed in the yard. He was infinitely patient in explaining things to me and teaching me how to do things. It was from Mister that I learned to fish. We dug red worms or pulled Catawba (Catalpa) worms from trees, and sometimes we caught hellgrammites in a sifter Mister made from one-half-inch mesh wire. We never lacked for bait, and we pulled many a line of bream out of that muddy creek. And when we caught them, there was no question but that we would scale and gut them and eat them for supper.
Mister also taught me to shoot, which started a lifelong passion for guns. He first taught me to shoot a .22 rifle, and I learned quickly. “You got to respect guns,” he told me. And he was forever saying, “There’s no such thing as an unloaded gun.” If Dad ever owned a gun, I never saw it, and my mother thought using a gun to kill a bird, a squirrel, or a rabbit was totally unnecessary, unless you were starving and needed something to eat. So it was Mister who was my mentor when it came to firearms.
Mister also taught me to work. He was obsessive about keeping Montebrier neat, and he would spend hours in the yard. Wearing a bow tie, he would pick up the swing blade, which he kept very sharp. He’d say, “If the blade is keen and sharp, you hardly break a sweat. Let the sling blade do the work.” I think he was generally right about that, but still it took muscle power on the downward swing if the grass or bushes were large and tough. Mister said the same thing was true of an ax, a hammer, or whatever tool you were using. The tools, not one’s arms, he said, should do the work.
Mister also taught me to limb up cedar trees with snippers and a pocket knife. To make a tree grow tall, he said, you had to cut off all the lower limbs and leaves, even if the tree is only three feet tall. That way the trees’ nourishment would move to the upper leaves and limbs. “I don’t want to duck when I walk through my own yard,” he’d say with a slight smile. He also planted a number of trees on the property, and he would baby them until they took hold. Plus he got St. Augustine grass runners on campus after Mr. Spot Jones-Williams brought the grass to Montevallo. Then he sprigged them at Montebrier and eventually got a full lawn.
Mister also showed me the old Delco battery system, a large bank of 48-volt direct current batteries located in a small house down under the hill. From the Delco house large copper wires ran from a battery connection plate up a small utility pole and from there was strung overhead into the house. Inside was a switch box with funny looking switches that turned the DC lights on in each room. There were small cords hanging from the center of the ceiling, and a DC light bulb was screwed into the receptacles. In the ballroom, or the big room as it was called, several cords were required. Of course, by the time I bought Montebrier in 1964, the DC bulbs and lighting system had been replaced by Alabama Power Company’s 110-volt alternating current light bulbs. But I was fascinated by the old system.
Mister also showed me the one-cylinder gas engine he used to pump water from the spring into a tank that was located on a steel tower sitting next to Montebrier’s back porch. Once the tank was filled, the water flowed by gravity to the kitchen and bath. I loved to hear this old pump engine run, as it had a wonderful rhythmic firing pattern, as if it were played by a drummer. It called out repeatedly, “Paradiddle, paradiddle, paraddidle, pair; paradiddle, paradiddle, paradiddle, pair.” Of course, the water was cold when it came out of the brass spigot at the kitchen sink, and there were no electric water heaters to get hot water from. Miss Jean would have to heat it on the stove, then pour it into the tub. She had two stoves, but mainly used a four-legged electric one made by General Electric. It had four eyes on top and an oven to the right above the eyes.
Mr. Jessie “Jaybird” Rutledge, noted citizen of Brierfield, caretaker of the Montebrier Club, and close friend of “Mister” and Jean Pittman. Mr. Jaybird was close to the Mahan family, befriending my Great Aunt Adelaide, my dad, and finally me. He spent his last working years at the newly created Brierfield Ironworks Park in the 1980s.
Back when Montebrier was hosting parties, dancing, and gambling events, there was only one commode and one lavatory in the house. In 1936, when Miss Jean and her first husband moved to Montebrier, they put a bathtub, a sink, and a commode in the old kitchen pantry. By the time I first saw that bathroom, the brass spigots had become quite dirty-looking, though I can’t say that bothered me at all. Nor was I bothered by the fact that the commode, tub, and sink drained though a pipe directly into Mahan Creek. Mister informed me that this waste water flowing into the creek made for a good fishing hole.
My favorite time at Montebrier was at night, when Mister and I would sit on the front porch and listen to the cicadas and frogs. Miss Jean would be inside reading so it’d just be us two. We didn’t talk much, but we were as close as could be. Occasionally, I would see a shadow coming up the drive, and it would be Mr. Jaybird Rutledge, who had spent most of his life on that property. Now he lived in a house up by the gate. Sometimes he and Mister would just talk for a while, but occasionally Mister would remove his shoes and socks, and Mr. Jaybird would trim Mister’s bunions. He would put Mister’s naked foot on his knee, take out his pocket knife, which was extremely sharp, and with surgical precision trim the hard, white, dead skin off of Mister’s bunions. During all this time Mister would suck on his pipe, and I’d look at the stars and think how good a place this was. But since I didn’t have any bunions, I never got to experience Mr. Jaybird’s surgical skills.
My trips to Montebrier lasted until I was in the seventh or eighth grade. I’m not exactly sure why they ended. Maybe there were more cool things to do with my cool friends—particularly my girlfriends—rather than waiting on the curb in front of 159 Shelby Street for the Pittmans to pick me up. But when Mister died in 1954 while I was a student at Auburn I was flooded with memories of Montebrier.
During my first marriage from 1956 to 1959, there seemed to be no room for Montebrier, but when I brought Linda to Montevallo in 1961, the first thing I did after taking her to meet Mother and Dad on Shelby Street was, according to her, to take her directly to Montebrier. We could not have known at the time that it would be called home by us and Miki and later by Stann. In 1974, Montebrier was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. If I am truly a stepper, then Linda’s and my efforts in saving historic Montebrier by bringing it to life as a home and sharing its historic fabric with so many people over the last forty-five years ranks at the top of my accomplishments.
Montebrier, my home, May 2013. Photograph by Daphney Walker.
Before Linda and I purchased Montebrier, we visited the house with our friends John and Marny Owens and their children.