Browse Items (963 total)
- Collection: Alabama Places and Spaces
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Auburn University
Established by charter in 1856 as East Alabama Male College, the academic institution that would come to be known as Auburn University was founded ten years before Lee County’s inception. Local residents, such as John Bowles Glenn, the pastor of…
Auburn Public School
In 1899, Auburn Mayor Charles Little and the town council appropriated bonds of $6,000 to build a large public schoolhouse. The 74x58 ½ foot building included a 40x70 foot auditorium on the top floor. Amenities included wood and coal pot-bellied…
Lee County High School
In 1914, the city of Auburn successfully petitioned the Lee County Board of Education to strip Opelika’s high school of the title “Lee County High School” and bequeath that distinction to a new high school in Auburn. Auburn provided seven acres…
Beulah High School
Under the management of Professor Franklin Little, Beulah Academy opened its doors in November 1894. In 1928, the Lee County Board of Education passed a motion to erect a consolidated first through twelfth grade school in Beulah. Beulah Academy, Pine…
Wittel Dormitory
Located at 205 South Gay Street, Wittel Dormitory represents an example of the colonial revival architectural style. Built in the early 1900s as the private residence of Samuel S. Wittel, the building first served as a boarding facility for…
Beauregard High School
In 1923, several rural one-room schools (including Whatley, Thompson, Hopewell, Hinson, Parker’s Crossroads, and Dorsey schools) in the vicinity of present-day Beauregard, AL consolidated to form the Whatley School. The school at Parker’s…
Pepperell Village School
A factory community appeared after the opening of Pepperell Manufacturing Company’s Opelika textile mill in 1925. A school founded in the new neighborhood under the aegis of the county school system served the first- through sixth-grade students of…
Auburn Junior High School
From 1931 to 1966, Auburn’s white middle (and elementary) school students operated under the aegis of Auburn High School at 332 East Samford Avenue. During this period, the sub-institution was known as Auburn Grammar School. When Auburn High School…
Luther N. Duncan Hall
The three-story Georgian-style building located at 322 Mell Street was erected in 1928 for the sole purpose of housing Alabama Polytechnic Institute’s Agricultural Extension Program, the capacity in which in still serves today. Named after Luther…
The Old Rotation
Located on Lem Morrison Drive directly across the street from the Auburn University Parking Services Building, The Old Rotation exemplifies Auburn’s tradition as a bastion of agricultural education. Professor J.F. Duggar established the acre in…
Lee-Scott Academy
Presbyterian Day School, a private academy, was founded in Auburn in 1965 and was renamed Lee Academy several years later. In 1970, a contingent of white Opelikans, displeased with pending implementation of the court-mandated integration of the city…
Henry G. Clift High School
In 1918, Henry G. Clift High School opened on the site of the old Opelika High School on the corner of North Eighth Street and Seventh Avenue. Opelika’s city council moved to name the new high school after the town’s mayor. Contractor W.J.…
William J. Samford Hall
Erected in 1888 on the foundation of Old Main Hall (which burned down in 1887), William J. Samford Hall is one of Auburn University’s most easily recognizable buildings. Bruce and Morgan Architectural Firm fashioned the four-story Italianate-style…
Opelika Middle School
In 1959, Henry G. Clift High School relocated to a new facility at 1206 Denson Drive and rechristened itself Opelika High School, the institutional name it bore from 1911 to 1918. U.S. District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson gave the Opelika city…
Mary Martin Hall
The institution that would come to be known as Auburn University’s first library operated out of three rooms on the second floor of William J. Samford Hall. These rooms quickly became overcrowded with an excessive amount of volumes. In 1908, Andrew…
Opelika High School, 1972-Present
In 1969, U.S. District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson ordered the Opelika to desegregate its school system. Observing that African Americans comprised 30 percent of the students enrolled in Opelika city schools, Johnson demanded that all of Opelika’s…
Ralph Brown Draughon Library
By the late 1950s, Alabama Polytechnic Institute’s Carnegie Library exceeded its storage capacity. The Board of Trustees recognized the immediate need for a larger facility, and in the early 1960s the university planned the construction of a major…
Haley Center
The largest building on Auburn University’s campus, the Haley Center is capable of accommodating 8,000 students at any given moment. The labyrinthine, 357,000-square-foot structure includes four quadrants centered around a central ten-story tower,…
J.W. Darden High School
Founded in 1951, J.W. Darden High School took on the ninth and tenth grade students of East Street High School and added eleventh and twelfth grade curricula. Darden was Opelika’s African-American high school until the city’s high schools…
East Street High School
Between 1910 and 1912, the city of Opelika erected the Opelika Colored School, the town’s first black public school. The school was located on East Street and housed ten classrooms. The school catered to students from the first to the tenth grade,…
Alumni Gymnasium
Irritated by the state’s flat refusal to fund a gymnasium for Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, Tom Bragg, the president of the Auburn Alumni Association, solicited funds from Auburn graduates all over the country. In February 1916,…
Graves Center
Alabama Polytechnic Institute built the Graves Center – actually a complex of thirty cottages, an amphitheatre, a large dining hall, and a brass bust of New Deal era governor Bibb Graves – piecemeal throughout the 1930s. The complex of 30 Greek…
The Deck Houses
As World War II neared culmination, Congress passed the G.I. Bill of Rights, ensuring a paid college education for American military personnel. America’s universities saw a massive influx of veteran students, and Alabama Polytechnic Institute’s…
Southern Union State Community College
Southern Union State Community College began its institutional life as Bethlehem College on June 2, 1922. John M. Hodge, a Wadley banker, donated forty acres to the Southern Christian Convention of Congregational Christian Churches as a site for the…
Auburn Methodist and Baptist Schools
Judge John Harper led a party of Methodists to the future site of Auburn, Alabama in late 1836. The next year, members the new community collaborated to erect a log Methodist church, located on the corner of modern-day East Magnolia Street and South…
Slaton's Academy
In 1857, this institution opened on the corner of what is now Tichenor Avenue and North Gay Street. Slaton’s Academy functioned as a preparatory school for young men pursuing admission to East Alabama Male College. William F. Slaton, a local…
Auburn Masonic Female College
In the early 1850s, Colonel Nathaniel Scott petitioned Auburn’s local Masonic lodge (Auburn Lodge #76) to sponsor a female educational center in town. In 1853, Auburn Masonic Female College became the town’s first women’s educational…
Auburn Female Institute
Auburn’s first post-Civil War public school, possibly founded as early as 1870, was actually a women’s school. Auburn Female Institute was located on Tichenor Avenue. Under Principal George W. Duncan, Auburn Female Institute offered instruction…
Loachapoka Rosenwald School
In the spring of 1913, Loachapoka became the site of the first of over 5,300 rural black schools in the United States subsidized by Sears CEO Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald, who grew up destitute, wanted to provide African Americans living in the South…
The Lathe
In the early years of the Civil War, the Lathe was constructed in Selma, Alabama to bore out 7-inch Brooke rifles that were the mainstay of Confederate ironclads and coastal fortifications stretched across the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. As Major…
The Chapel
Founded as the Auburn Presbyterian Church in 1851, “the Chapel” was built by local slaves belonging to one of Auburn’s first residents, Edwin Reese. Like Langdon Hall and Old Main Hall, it served as a makeshift hospital from July 1864 through…
Pine Hill Cemetery
Pine Hill Cemetery has over 1,100 graves and contains a mass grave of at least ninety-eight unidentifiable Confederate soldiers who died in the makeshift hospitals in Auburn. In 1893, the Ladies Memorial Association erected a monument over the spot…
Auburn Train Station
In February 1861, president-elect Jefferson Davis rode a train from his plantation in Mississippi to Atlanta and then to Montgomery, Alabama for his inauguration as president of the Confederacy. On February 16, at the Auburn train depot,…