Category: St. Clair Tourism

Home of Broadway actress, Springville teacher being restored with ‘love’

Story by Scottie Vickery
Photos by Mackenzie Free

After leaving a career on Broadway during the Great Depression, Margaret Byers took center stage in the hearts of Springville residents. She was a little person – not much bigger than the first-graders she taught for decades – but she made a tremendous impact on everyone she met.

That’s a big part of the reason why Nancy Tucker and her daughter, Tami Spires, have taken such care while renovating the home where “Miss Margaret,” as she was affectionately known, lived most of her life. “We just felt like we needed to honor her,” Tami said.

The home, which Miss Margaret’s parents built in 1891, has some unique features, including doorknobs that are much lower than typical to accommodate their daughter’s small stature. “She just quit growing as a child,” Tami said. “No one really knows why.”

One of Nancy’s favorite features of the home, which boasts 14-foot ceilings, is an old phone nook that’s built into a wall and is only about 2 feet off the ground. “She had a little chair that sat next to it,” Nancy said. “It’s such a unique house, and we’re so happy to have it.”

Neither of the women was in the market for a new home when Nancy first saw the “For Sale” sign while walking with a friend one morning last summer. In fact, they both live right down the street from the Byers home, with Nancy’s house directly behind Tami’s.

Still, Nancy had a feeling she just couldn’t shake. “When I saw it that morning, I thought, ‘That’s going to be ours,’” she said. “I wanted it the minute I found out it was for sale, before I even went in it.” 

Nancy immediately called Tami, who contacted the real estate agent and scheduled a tour. A few hours after the walk-through, Nancy had a contract on the yellow house that stands directly across the street from Springville Middle School.

“We walked across the threshold, and she said, ‘I’m buying it,’” Tami said. Nancy wanted it so badly, in fact, that she didn’t even get an inspection on the house before signing the papers.

“I bought it like it was a loaf of bread,” Nancy said with a laugh. “I didn’t even think about the structure of the house or anything like that. I just loved it.”

Fortunately, they’ve since learned that, despite being more than 130 years old, the house is in pretty good condition. “There was no mold, no leaks, nothing wrong with the foundation,” Tami said. “We got lucky.”

They replaced the knob and tube wiring that is common in historic homes and can pose safety concerns, as well as some rotten porch boards. They covered up the fireplace in the dining room, one of four that were in the original house, and had the chimney removed because it was in bad shape. They also had new kitchen cabinets, which were not original to the home, and new countertops installed.

Everything else has been done by the mother/daughter duo. “Mom and I have singlehandedly done 95 percent of everything inside the house that’s been done,” Tami said. “Every weekend, we’re either here working on the house or shopping for things to furnish it. The shopping is more fun.”

While they love the history of old houses – Tami’s home was built in 1885, and Nancy’s was built in 1926 – they are especially intrigued with this one just because it belonged to Miss Margaret.

She was a beloved first-grade teacher for decades, and Nancy, Tami and Tami’s daughter, Rebekah Wester, are all teachers, as well.

Nancy taught Business at Springville High School for 26 years before retiring in 2000. A former English teacher at Moody Middle School, Tami is currently the counselor at Springville Elementary School. And Rebekah, who will live in the home once renovations are complete, teaches English at Ragland High School.

“We kind of feel a kinship with Miss Margaret because she was a teacher, and we are three generations of teachers,” Tami said. A member of the Springville Preservation Society, she leads walking tours of Springville for the fourth-grade students each year and for the public each spring. “This has always been my favorite house to talk about,” she said. “I love telling everyone about Miss Margaret.”

Small stature, tremendous impact

As a young woman, Miss Margaret dreamed of a career on the stage. Born into one of Springville’s pioneer families, she went to Huntingdon College in Montgomery after graduating from high school. A singer and dancer, she also attended an arts school in Chicago, according to an article on the “Tiny Teacher” that appeared in The Birmingham News in 1953.

She moved to New York as a young woman and appeared in several Broadway productions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. “We’ve always been told she was a munchkin in the Broadway production of The Wizard of Oz, but we have not confirmed that to be true,” Tami said.

She did, however, play children’s roles in several productions. According to Broadway databases and other sources, she was cast in Merry-Go-Round, which played in 1927 at the Klaw Theatre, and in Her Unborn Child, which played in 1928 at the 48^th Street Theatre. In 1929, 1930 and 1931, she played Bo-Peep in Babes in Toyland at the Imperial Theatre. She also was in a traveling theater troupe at some point, according to The Birmingham News article.

“She got to play a lot of the children’s roles on Broadway,” Tami said. Child labor laws were strictly enforced at the time, and at one theater, child welfare officials came after the director because they thought she was working too late at night. “She had to show them her ID to prove she was a grown woman,” Tami said.

A few years into the Depression, Miss Margaret returned home to Springville. “She was told to find another career because people just weren’t going to the theater anymore,” Tami explained.

Miss Margaret enrolled at Jacksonville State University and earned an education degree. She started teaching first grade at the Old Rock School, now an historic landmark. “If you got Miss Margaret, you were somebody,” said Nancy, whose son, Jamey, was in her last first-grade class. “I was so excited when I heard she would be his teacher. I thought I would absolutely die if he didn’t get Miss Margaret.”

Sandra Jones, a Springville native who now lives in Pell City, was another one of the lucky students. In 1994, she wrote a column about her former teacher for the St. Clair News Aegis and included a memory of the first time she met the woman who “was practically a living legend in Springville.”

“Margaret Byers wasn’t much taller than I – even in her tiny high-heeled shoes,” she wrote. “I studied the pert, pixieish woman as she darted about, smiling and chatting. Her face reflected warmth and there was a pleasant lilt in her voice. As I watched her, my fears suddenly melted away. In an instant, I came under the spell of ‘Miss Margaret’ – a spell that still lingers even after all these years.”

Even though she left the stage, Miss Margaret still loved to perform. She had an upright piano in her classroom and would often sing songs for her students. “She knew all the latest tunes: ‘Sugartime,’ ‘Catch a Falling Star,’ and ‘Mr. Sandman’ – and we sang them all,” Sandra wrote.

One of her fondest memories is of the day Miss Margaret let Sandra wear her shoes. “I had a pair of those play high heeled shoes that I had carried to school for Show and Tell. She traded shoes with me and let me wear her tiny high heels all day,” Sandra said. “They fit perfectly.”

Although she was well-prepared for second-grade, Sandra said the life lessons she learned from Miss Margaret were as important as the curriculum.

“Though she was small in stature, she was big on life; a buoyant bundle of boundless energy,” she wrote in her column. “And though she taught me ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic,’ I think the most valuable lesson I learned from her was the importance of blending work and play. She taught me that life is held in balance with the right portion of each.”

It needs to be loved

Those are the kinds of stories Nancy and Tami love hearing now that they’ve bought the house, which has had several owners since Miss Margaret passed away in 1987.  Since taking possession of the house on Aug. 1, they’ve spent all their free time renovating it together.

“We have probably spent more time together in the past few months than we have in the last year, and she lives right next door,” Tami said with a laugh. “We’re not afraid to tackle anything. We’ll try anything once, and we’ve learned a lot.”

They’ve painted every room in the house, which was no small feat with the tall ceilings. “I was here by myself one day on top of a ladder, and I thought, ‘That’s kind of stupid, being 88 and being up on top of a 14-foot ladder,” Nancy said. “We decided after that neither of us would get on a ladder unless someone else was here,” Tami added.

They hung new wallpaper in the bathroom, which still has the original cast iron tub. When they pulled off the previous owner’s, some of the sheetrock came with it, so they decided to paint over the wallpaper hanging in the living room. “It’s not professionally done at all, but everything we’ve done has been done with love,” Tami said.

She replaced the kitchen backsplash, and she and Nancy have spent countless days painstakingly scraping linoleum off the kitchen floor and trying to save the hardwood floors in that room. When they needed a break, Tami set up her sewing machine in the sitting room and made all the curtains, which are 108 inches in length.

Through the years, previous owners made some changes to the house. The kitchen was originally located in the back of the house, with an attached butler’s pantry. A maid’s room was just across the back porch. Now, the kitchen is in the center of the home, and the back room has been turned into a bedroom. Tami and Nancy hope to eventually turn the pantry into a second full bath.

 “The layout is not ideal for modern living, but it is what it is,” Tami said. “That’s kind of the charm.”

Now that the inside is nearing completion, the focus will soon turn to the outside. They want to clear the brush off the side lot and restore the yard to its former glory. They also plan to paint the outside of the house, and Nancy has decided that’s a job for someone else.

“We talked about doing it ourselves and just taking a section at a time,” Tami said. Nancy wasn’t convinced. “She talked about it, not me,” she said with a grin. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do, and you have to wait on one thing to finish another. We don’t want to get new gutters until we paint the house, and we don’t want to paint the house until we get some of these limbs cut.”

Once the renovations are finally complete, Nancy and Tami want to host an Open House for all of Miss Margaret’s former students. “Ever since we bought the house, people have been sharing so many wonderful stories about her, and we want to get everyone together and get those stories written down,” Tami said.

“Miss Margaret was loved by the whole community,” Nancy added. “She was loved by the other teachers, she was loved by the students, she was just loved by everyone.”

And that’s why they feel honored to be the next caretakers of the house that shaped the little woman with the big heart. “We were so afraid someone would come in and not love it the way we do and tear it down,” Tami said. “It doesn’t need to be torn down; it needs to be loved.”