Story by Elaine Hobson Miller Photos by Graham Hadley
If a gaggle of giggly girls is any indication, Heathermoor Farm is the greatest place in the world to take horseback riding lessons. A visit to the farm any given hour on any given Saturday reveals at least a dozen young teens and pre-teens scattered about. Those who are not actually astride the horses are hanging out and hanging all over each other smack in the middle of the indoor arena. They are laughing, playing on their cellphones and, occasionally, watching their peers take lessons.
“I want to do a winter tournament, the fun shows and then the National Academy Finals,” says 10-year-old Evie Campbell, who lives in Hoover. She has been taking lessons since September 2020, having discovered Heathermoor through her good friend, Alex Mountz, who also takes lessons there. “She talked about it, I looked into it and told my mom.”
Evie has always liked horses and feels quite comfortable on the back of one. “My first time here, I was a bit nervous, but I was excited, too,” she says. “Now I take lessons twice a week.”
Katie Bentley of Trussville, who takes lessons Thursdays and Saturdays, also discovered horseback riding through a friend. She now owns a mare named Secret, a gift from her mother, Amy Jones, for Katie’s 12th birthday in November 2020. “I love it,” she says of riding. “It makes me feel calm and relaxed. I go there three times a week. I just ride for fun on the third (non-lesson) day or play with Secret.”
Riding classes in the large indoor arena
Heathermoor Farm can claim more than just the adulation of a bunch of young girls, though. With over 100 equestrians, both men and women ages five to 68, either taking lessons or training for horse shows, it is probably the largest horse-teaching facility in the state of Alabama.
“We’re the only American Saddlebred horseback riding academy in the Birmingham area with an indoor arena,” says co-owner Jennifer Fernambucq.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “There’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a man.” Jennifer knows exactly what Churchill meant and how the teenage girls feel about horses. “It’s an incredible thing, the way a horse touches a human being,” Jennifer says. “It’s such a gift.”
She was 10 years old when a friend in her ballet class took her to Heathermoor, where the friend was taking lessons. Started in 1965 by John and Anita Cowart, the farm was located off Highway 119 in Jefferson County then. It only took one visit to hook Jennifer for life.
Later, when she was in her early 20s and working for a financial consulting firm, she received a phone call from Mrs. Cowart. She needed an instructor, was Jennifer interested? “I had not ridden in several years,” she says. “College, then becoming a working mom, kept me busy. But I quit my job and joined her. It worked well. I could stay with my babies mornings and teach in the afternoons.”
Five years later, the Cowarts retired, and Jennifer and a business partner bought the farm. That was in 1999. “In a few years, we dissolved the partnership, and my partner started her own stable, Stepping Stone in Columbiana,” Jennifer explains. “I’ve been at it 20 years now.”
She and her husband, Richie, who met through their love of horses, moved Heathermoor to its present, 16-acre spot on Carl Jones Road in Moody five years ago. They built a 42-stall barn and quickly filled it up. Constructed in a U-shape, with the 55-by-175-foot enclosed arena in the center and 200 feet of stalls along each side. The overflows are in the pastures, for a total of 55 horses.
On one side, the stalls are home to performance or show horses owned by individuals. On the other, which is the lesson or school side, some animals are owned by Jennifer and Richie and others by individual riders. The door to the center of the “U” features a long window with barstool seating that allows parents, grandparents and friends to observe the arena riders without disturbing them. An office and storage rooms flank the lobby.
“We lease our lesson horses out,” Jennifer says of the horses the facility owns. “I own them, but the riders treat them as theirs. They can come and ride them any time.”
For Richie and Jennifer Fernambucq and their children, running the farm is a family affair.
Performance riders take part in 10 shows a year all over the Southeast, she says. “We work the performance horses five days a week, and their owners ride once a week. However, they come in several times a week.” As for her and her husband’s respective roles, she says, “Richie teaches the horses, I teach the riders.”
She and employee Brittany Campbell (no relation to Evie) teach about 120 lessons per week, 40 of them on Saturday, their busiest day.
“Knees tight, don’t move your arms, and walk,” she instructs a rider one recent Saturday. “Heels down, hands up.”
Some riders take lessons in small groups, many in private lessons. The former costs $30 per half hour, the latter $40. Most advertising is by word of mouth.
“His head’s too low. Remember, his ears need to be even with your eyes,” Jennifer tells another student. “Use your left leg to push his body so he’s straight.”
Meanwhile, her husband demonstrates a maneuver for another student. “These horses are athletes,” Richie says.“We bring in farriers from Kentucky who specialize in American Saddlebreds. We also bring in chiropractors. We spend a lot of money to keep them healthy.”
They specialize in show horses, but Saddlebreds are also used as hunter-jumpers and sometimes for the trail, according to Richie. “American Saddlebreds are bred to be high-strung, and they’re supposed to give with everything they have in a short period,” he says. “Most of their competition performances last about 10 minutes.”
Brittany has been a full-time instructor at Heathermoor for two years. She started riding when she was 7, left for a few years, then came back to help Jennifer and Richie. In fact, she gave up a bank job to work at Heathermoor. “My mom, my sister and I all ride,” she says. “We’ve had three horses here for 10 years.”
Boys and girls, men and women take lessons from Brittany and Jennifer, but the females far outnumber the males. “I have ladies in their 60s, and one of the men is 68,” Jennifer says. “He started taking lessons a couple of years ago. You’re never too old to learn to ride.”
Cannonball Man holds our past in his hands and heart
Story by Buddy Eiland Photos by Graham Hadley Submitted Photos
Searching for history can become a lifetime obsession. Just ask Steve Phillips. Although the guns of the American Civil War fell silent in 1865, Phillips has spent more than 50 years searching for the cannonballs and artillery shells, along with other artifacts left behind from that great conflict. In the process, he has become a knowledgeable student of Civil War history and has built one of the most extensive private collections of its artifacts in existence.
Phillips is a retired professional diver, having owned and operated Southern Skin Diver Supply Company in Birmingham for many years. His sons, Spencer and Forrest, still operate the business, and both are expert professional divers.
After leaving the Air Force and before he became involved in the dive business, Phillips was in the office machine business in Birmingham. He and his wife, Susan, live on a comfortable acreage straddling the St. Clair/Shelby County line. Their property has a lake, a creek and a secret mountain waterfall. Long ago, Native Americans lived there, and he and his family have found thousands of stone points over the years that they left behind.
Phillips has spent years reading, researching and learning where to look and how to find Civil War relics and artifacts. Searching by metal detecting on private land permissions and diving in public waters, he has found about half of his collection.
Cannister shot, made up of small balls, and other shells
The rest he has bought from other collectors, dealers and museums selling surplus items from their collections. Although his collection contains an unbelievable variety of artifacts, Phillips says, “I’m really all about cannonballs and artillery projectiles.” Learning from an early mentor, Tom Dickey of Atlanta, Phillips became an expert at disarming and preserving artillery projectiles. (Dickey is the brother of Deliverance author James Dickey). Over the years, he has disarmed and preserved over 2,000 cannonballs and artillery shells, developing his own methods from trial and error along the way.
The preservation is necessary because the iron will deteriorate from exposure to the air after being in the ground or water for so many years. The disarming process is extremely dangerous, as, even after over 150 years, the black powder sealed inside can still be viable and can explode if improperly handled.
He has designed a way to disarm projectiles safely and remotely, using a shed about a hundred yards behind his house and barn with a drilling apparatus controlled by ropes and pulleys to allow him to maintain a safe distance from the operation. “I don’t recommend people try this,” he says. “I’ve never had one to explode, but I treat every one like it might.”
After drilling into a shell, the black powder can then be safely washed out. Phillips uses a process of electrolysis to remove rust and scale that results from many years in water or in the ground. Then he boils the shell, usually several times, to remove salt and sulphites from the iron and help stabilize it. Finally comes a coat of preservative to complete the process.
Interesting among Phillips’ extensive and quite varied collection is probably the greatest number of “war logs” in any private collection. These are tree trunks from the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, that have artillery shells embedded in them. They speak to the intensity of the battle and were obtained from Tom Dickey’s collection after his death and from a museum in Atlanta.
The Enfield and the Coal Torpedo
What does he consider the most valuable item in his entire collection? Phillips is quick with an answer. “Monetarily, or to me personally?” he asks. “Probably money-wise would be the coal torpedo because it’s so rare. To me, personally, it would be my great-grandfather’s Enfield rifle that was left for me on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Of all the hundreds of items in my collection, it would be my favorite. It’s not the rarest, but it’s my favorite,” which leads us to two of Phillips’ most intriguing stories about his collection.
Rifle returns ‘home’
Some years ago, Phillips was attending the Nashville Relics Show, displaying some of his cannonballs and other items from his collection. “I subscribed to a magazine for The Horse Soldier, an antiques dealer in Gettysburg that sells relics and other artifacts from the Civil War. I was looking at a copy of the magazine, and, normally, I would just look at the cannonball and artillery section, but I was bored, and I began to look at other sections.
Phillips with the Enfield rifle that belonged to his great-grandfather, Private/Corporal John C. Deason, that was recovered from Devil’s Den, part of the battle of Gettysburg
“I saw a listing for a British-made Enfield rifle, a very well-made rifle, better than most people had. On one side of the stock were carved the initials “JCD,” and on the other side was carved, “Co B 44th Ala Infantry.” It was identified to a Private/Corporal John C. Deason of Company B, of the 44th Alabama Infantry. John C. Deason was John Columbus Deason, my great-grandfather on my mother’s side of my family.”
Deason fought in the battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War as a member of Company B of the 44th Alabama Infantry. They were involved in the part of the battle known as Devil’s Den. The fighting took place in close quarters among some large rocks. The rifle was picked up by the owner of the Slyder farm, which was part of the battlefield. It was missing the ramrod, and because of the close quarters of the fighting, the ramrod was likely bent, rendering the rifle useless. Without the ramrod, it couldn’t be reloaded, so he probably dropped it, picked up another rifle and continued to fight.” About 130 years later, Slyder family descendants sold their collection of relics collected after the battle.
Phillips contacted The Horse Soldier, expressing an interest in buying the rifle. Told that the rifle had been sold, he said he would like to contact the buyer and try to purchase it. “Don’t let him know,” he was told, “because he is a Yankee, and if he finds out you want it, you’re not going to get it.” He backed away from trying to buy the gun, and about five years later, he received a call from The Horse Soldier, asking if he was still interested in buying it. “I told them I was, so I bought it and brought it home.” This special rifle now occupies a place of honor, hanging over the mantle in his den.
Rare find
The coal torpedo Phillips found on an underwater dive. “I picked it up and thought it was just trash, but I kept it because I didn’t want to keep hearing it on my metal detector. I had found a 12-pound ball that day, and when I began to start cleaning it up, I threw the ‘trash’ into the tumbler with it to help knock some of the rust off.”
The tumbling cleaned rust from the odd piece he had found as well, and he noticed what looked like copper in the side of it. Comparing it with several artillery fuses from his collection, he determined that it was, indeed, a fuse plug. Taking the object to his veterinarian, who X-rayed it for him, he determined that it was hollow. Further research determined that what he had found was a coal torpedo, used by Confederate spies in the Civil War.
The coal
torpedo – one of
only four known to exist
It was cast from iron in the form of a lump of coal, filled with four or five ounces of powder, and, when covered with pitch and coal dust, disguised it so it could be placed in the coal bunker of a ship. Shoveled into the firebox of the ship, it would blow up the firebox. That would rupture the boiler, which, essentially blew up the ship.
Coal torpedoes were credited with destroying several ships during the war, and many, including Phillips, believe one was used to destroy the Sultana on the Mississippi River, resulting in the largest loss of life from a single ship in U.S. maritime history. Over 1,800 people died in the explosion and fire.
Phillips has the only coal torpedo known to have been found since the Civil War, and one of only four known to still exist. One was found on Jefferson Davis’ desk when Richmond surrendered, being used as a paperweight. Two were found at the Confederate spy headquarters, which was located in Canada during the war. According to Phillips, it is likely one of the rarest and most valuable relics of the war. “I thought I had found trash,” he said, “but what I had found was just wonderful. We don’t really know what its value to a collector might be because it will never be sold.”
The Alaska connection
If you are paying close attention, you might notice that Phillips quite often wears a solid, 14-carat-gold belt buckle. It was cast from a mold made from a Confederate belt buckle. In addition to being a Civil War relic collector, Phillips is also a gold prospector. For more than 25 years, he has spent about two months in Alaska, mining for gold. Diving and dredging in the Bering Sea at Nome, on claims he and his son, Spencer own, he has very successfully found gold over the years. He also has working claims further inland from Nome. Although he no longer dives, his son, Spencer does, joining him in Alaska during the summer.
According to Phillips, gold mining there is not as productive as it once was, but he continues to find gold. Inland, most of their pursuit involves dredging in the river there. The inland claim is extremely remote, so much so that, when they leave for the summer, the cabin there is left unlocked, providing refuge and shelter in case a hunter might become stranded there in the harsh winter. The greatest winter threat to the cabin is bears, who sometimes do damage to the property while they are away.
The remoteness of the area presents its own problems, according to Phillips, and resourcefulness and self-sufficiency become virtues. Failures to vehicles and equipment left to the elements over the harsh winters, along with poor access to spare parts, present their own challenges, and major repairs are especially diffiuclt … and frequent.
Phillips has made a hobby-business of fashioning jewelry from gold “pickers” he has found gold mining. These are gold particles larger than gold dust, but not large enough to be considered nuggets.
Phillips has generously shared his Civil War collection, placing many items on permanent loan to be displayed for the interest and enjoyment of the public. The museum at Tannehill State Park is furnished with items from his collection.
In keeping with that practice and with a personal desire that his collection will always be accessible for enjoyment and study by the public, Phillips’ collection will soon be moving to a new home. It will be placed on permanent loan at the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ headquarters and museum in Columbia, Tenn.
A number of videos Phillips has made to share his stories about collection are available on YouTube. Videos include the John Columbus Deason rifle, the confederate coal torpedo, artillery projectiles from Selma, Confederate mines, disarming and preserving artillery shells, and more. Also posted are videos about his gold prospecting adventures in Alaska. l
Story by Leigh Pritchett Submitted photos from Blair Goodgame and Don Smith
Amid the uncertainty of 2020, something positive appears to have occurred: a reawakening to the great outdoors.
The days, weeks, months of being confined and working or schooling remotely fed the desire to roam carefree in the wide open.
The outdoors became a refuge – a convenient and affordable one at that.
“There were so many unknowns about COVID-19 when it was first reported,” explained Don Smith, father of threechildren. “It seemed very contagious and the more populated, urbanized areas were having the highest outbreaks.
“When the lockdown in late March took place, my family and I decided we would focus our time outdoors, getting exercise, creating new memories instead of staying locked in our homes,” continued Smith, who is executive director of St. Clair County Economic Development Council (EDC).
Every weekend that the weather cooperated, Smith, wife April and their family went hiking in and out of St. Clair or kayaking on Big Canoe Creek in Springville and Ashville.
Blair Goodgame, the EDC’s tourism coordinator, can understand why. Enjoying nature and the outdoors helps to relieve stress and gets people out of their homes “to refresh and rejuvenate.”
Natural settings are not difficult to find and are basically free of charge, which is a plus for individuals and families whose income may have decreased during the pandemic.
Settings close to home also became the destination of choice as vacation plans were put on hold during the summer.
People took shorter trips instead and rediscovered what was in their community and county. “We’re seeing a resurgence of that,” Goodgame said.
Camping on the trail
with the Smith family
Smith, in fact, spoke of a camping trip his sons had right in their own neighborhood.
People can enjoy the outdoors simply by strolling through their community or along city blocks, they both agreed.
Valerie Painter, manager of Pell City Civic Center, said foot traffic was up not only in Lakeside Park, which features a mile-long walking trail, but also at the adjoining Pell City Sports Complex.
“My husband walks out there (in the park) every day with our dog, and he has noticed an increase,” Painter said.
She observed, as well, that people were renting pavilions and using the amenities of Lakeside Park later into 2020 than she has seen in previous years.
Right up to the end of 2020, Lakeside Park was being used for exercising, playing, picnicking, gathering, … “everything but swimming,” Painter said.
The park appeared to serve as relief for “cabin fever,” and a solution for social-distancing dilemmas. In October 2020, three weddings, some receptions and a large baptismal service were held at Lakeside Park. November’s tally included a wedding, four birthday parties and a baby shower. One family celebrated Thanksgiving there.
The uptick in visitors going to natural settings apparently has grown common. Goodgame said that each time she went to Double Cove at Logan Martin Dam Park during the fall, she saw a greater number of people than usual.
To Goodgame, this indicates a rediscovery of the outdoors, a new awareness of St. Clair’s assets, and a fresh vision of the possibilities they present.
A case in point is open-air venues, such as St. Clair County Arena. Goodgame said open-air venues have become welcome alternatives for holding craft shows and other events.
“This resurrection of the outdoors started even before COVID,” she noted.
Prior to the pandemic slowdown that began in March 2020, boat traffic on lakes in the county had increased noticeably. People were taking advantage of opportunities close to home, she said.
Those possibilities in St. Clair are growing in number and size. One wilderness area is under development and another wilderness area has been proposed.
When completed in 2022, Canoe Creek Nature Preserve in Springville will boast 28 miles of trails, Goodgame said. The preserve is part of Alabama’s Forever Wild program.
Another Forever Wild preserve has been proposed for the Ragland area. Goodgame said it would offer miles and miles of trails as well.
St. Clair County’s numerous outlets for hiking, kayaking, boating, birding, climbing and camping draw a large number of visitors from outside the county, too. Interestingly, Goodgame said, the visitors are even finding places that have largely been well-kept secrets.
Those secrets – along with the county’s assets, spaciousness and proximity to Birmingham and Atlanta – attracted scores of people to relocate to St. Clair in 2020 despite the pandemic, Goodgame said.
This continues St. Clair County’s growing trend. According to recent population figures compiled by Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, St. Clair gained an estimated 858 residents in 2018-2019. Between 2010 and 2019, the county’s population increased by an estimated 6,162 people.
Take a hike!
Hiking ranks high on Goodgame’s list of favorite outdoor activities. In fact, she spends two weekends a month hiking with her dog.
One of her favorite hiking spots in St. Clair County is Double Cove at Logan Martin Dam Park. Another is Ten Islands Park at Neely Henry Dam.
Goodgame includes Pell City’s Lakeside Park on her suggested list of hiking spots, saying it is ideal for people who prefer a paved path. Goodgame said the wetlands overlook, a project by Logan Martin Lake Protection Association, the botanical display of the Pell City Garden Club’s native plant garden, waterfowl and wildlife along the path make it a good place to walk and observe nature.
Hiking and being outdoors can be particularly beneficial for children, she said, because the youth learn about plants, creatures, geography, geology and the world around them.
Hiking is one of Blair Goodgame’s favorite activities.
The expanse overseen by Coosa Riverkeepers is one area of the county that she recommends for a nature “classroom.” The riverkeepers, she said, strive to document different species and to maintain a pristine environment.
Camp Sumatanga features the Sumatanga Mountain Trail, which is a 2.4-mile, lightly-trafficked out-and-back trail near Gallant, north of Ashville. The trail is rated moderate and features a lake. It is mainly used for hiking and running and is open on weekends. Dogs are allowed on the trail, but they must be kept on a leash. Camp Sumatanga was founded in 1947 as part of a United Methodist camping ministry, according to its website. The original property consisted of 430 acres extending from the crest of Chandler Mountain down into the valley of Greasy Cove. Breathtaking vistas are part of its allure.
Its name means: “… a place low enough for all who have a mind to climb to reach its heights and yet high enough for all to catch a vision of higher heights.”
Any hiking trail can be educational, as children look, for example, for bird holes in trees or count the different species of flowers, Goodgame said.
Hiking is a source of fun, too. “You can plan scavenger hunts with (the children),” she said. Also, using a hiking app lets children keep up with where they are on the trail and to compete in challenges.
Developing a love of and an appreciation for nature “is going to be better for our kids because they will be better guardians of our land later,” Goodgame said. “It gives us something positive to look forward to in the future.”
One of the many benefits of hiking, Goodgame said, is that it gets adults and children away from computer screens, phones, television and other technological devices.
Smith agreed wholeheartedly. “The great thing about hiking is it disconnects the family from electronics and allows for great conversation.”
Time spent discovering new places, hiking and enjoying nature knits family members together and forms memories to cherish always, said Goodgame and Smith.
“Hiking … costs nothing to walk on a trail and enjoy fresh air, wildlife and natural views,” Smith said. “… Overnight camping can require some investment, but it can be done on a reasonable budget and includes a campfire and stories for free. Sleeping under the stars miles from civilization really helps you appreciate all that we have that makes our life easier. It’s good to be reminded of how far we have come and all the incredible things nature offers us.”
Story by Elaine Hobson Miller Photo by Meghan Frondorf
Derrick Mostella was destined to be mayor of Ashville. The first time he walked into the old B&R Grocery on Sixth Street as a kid, proprietor Bill Murray looked down at him and declared, “You’re gonna be mayor one day, kid.”
“My mom told that story so much with me growing up, at some point, I just decided it was already written, that it was something I had to do,” Mostella says. “She told the story like I didn’t have a choice.”
The path to the mayor’s office wasn’t a straight one, nor was it lined with roses and violins. Rather, it was a circuitous route fraught with identity issues because of his biracial background. But dealing with those issues shaped Mostella’s character and, ultimately, his vision for the City of Ashville. It’s a vision that is changing the face of the downtown area and the way city government operates. Mostella hopes it’s changing the way Ashvillians feel about their town, too.
“My mom and I do a Thanksgiving dinner every year that’s free to the public,” Mostella says. “We did it take-out style in 2020, but it really kind of embodies what we want for Ashville. We want it to be a kind of mix of Mayberry and Cheers, where everybody knows your name.”
Derrick Mostella and his mother, Belinda Mostella
When Mostella was elected mayor for his first term in 2016, he was 37, making him one of the city’s youngest mayors and its first biracial one at the same time. Local newspaper headlines portrayed him as the city’s first Black mayor, and that made Mostella cringe. He works hard at avoiding labels, believing they are meant to separate and divide. Besides, calling him “Black” doesn’t tell his whole story.
“I do understand the pride our Black citizens feel about my election, and I appreciate the fact that they feel they have a voice now where they may have not in the past,” Mostella says.
It’s no secret that Mostella has a Black mother and a white father. His mother, Belinda Mostella, was a dispatcher at the city jail when she met his father, James Murray, who was an Ashville police officer. Although he has never had an in-depth relationship with his father’s family, Mostella has always known where he came from and is proud of that.
“I’m a child of Ashville,” he says. “Everybody knows who my folks are. I would hope that race doesn’t do a whole lot to dictate how somebody feels about me. I got elected not by Black people, not by white people, but by the people of Ashville, and I like to thinkthey elected me because I share their values, and they trust me, and none of that has anything to do with race at the end of the day.”
Race played a big role in Mostella’s childhood, though. He was raised in a Black household by his mom and his great-grandparents, Walter and Lila Mostella, but his light skin and curly blonde hair led casual acquaintances to think he was white. That made for some testy situations, some of them funny, some of them heart-breaking, all of them shaping his view of the world.
“My first experience in elementary school, and I can remember it like it was yesterday, was having a white kid ask me, ‘Why you gittin’ on the bus with all those N****s?” Mostella recalls. “Same thing on the playground. I’m out there with my brother, my cousins, and some kid comes up and says, ‘What you doin’ over there with them, why ain’t you over here?’ A shy kid, often he just ran off and cried. “There were many, many times I would cry myself to sleep,” he says.
His great-grandparents tried to shield him from the slings and arrows of racial tensions as much as they could. “I can remember our church going to Six Flags and my great-grandmother wouldn’t let me go because she was convinced something bad would happen to me,” he says, choking back tears at the painful memory. “She said, ‘Being this little white kid over there with all those Black folks (from his church), everybody having fun, not paying attention, they’re not going to watch you, and something will happen, you just can’t go, baby.’ As much as that hurt, I knew she did it because she loved me, and she was really, really trying to protect me.”
He sees wry humor, however, in a repeating high school experience. His all-time favorite teacher was Gina Wilson, who now works for the St. Clair County Board of Education. Every time a standardized test came around, she would allow Mostella to stand up in class and flip a coin to decide his race for that day. “You know those standardized tests where they ask for your race,” Mostella says, smiling at the memory. “I would say heads Black, tails white. So that was a running joke, what color are you going to be today, dear?”
His nickname, Flip, had nothing to do with that coin toss, however. An uncle who was a fan of comedian Flip Wilson gifted him with that moniker and it stuck. “Everybody knows me as ‘Flip,’” he says.
Mostella says his early years were tough because he caught whacks from both ends of the racial stick. “I’ve probably seen more racism than the average 100 percent Black person. There was a period in my life where I wasn’t white enough for white folks and not Black enough for Black folks, and that was rough,” he says, the tears flowing freely now. “It was brutal. My great-grandmother was my rock. She was the one I would go and cry on.”
When Mostella was in middle school, his mom moved to Memphis. He persuaded her to let him stay in Ashville with his great-grandparents. She convinced him to join her when he was 15, and it was his first time to leave the state of Alabama. That move lasted six weeks. During the middle of those six weeks, he returned to Ashville for a football game and ran into Amanda Minton. After admitting they had crushes on each other, they hung out, and he decided then and there to move home.
Mostella was always near the top of his class at Ashville High School and wanted to go to college. His grandparents couldn’t read or write, so they couldn’t sign applications for college and financial aid. Amanda, who is now his wife, did all of that for him. “She forced me to do it, letting me know it needed to be done and holding me accountable to get it done,” he says, tearing up again. “She’s fantastic, she really is, and I probably don’t tell her that enough.”
Mostella and Minton, who is white, graduated from AHS in 1997. Both went to UAB for a year, then transferred to Gadsden State Community College to finish their prerequisites. Around 1999 or 2000, both moved to Memphis, where he worked and lived with his mom while Minton lived in the dorm and got her occupational therapist degree at UT-Memphis. They stayed in Memphis for a year or two after she graduated, then returned home to Ashville in 2004 and got married. “We knew that whatever we wanted to accomplish, we wanted it to be here,” he says.
He worked for his father-in-law, Terry Minton, at Teague’s Hardware for a couple of years while contemplating his next move. He enjoyed most of his time there, but it’s also where he had some of the same type of painful experiences he had growing up. He was often the guy standing in a corner that no one knows is part Black.
“I couldn’t believe some of the hatred that people would spew and really more for laughs,” he says. “What was hurtfulmore than anything is that it was for chuckles and giggles and little one-off comments and things like that, and that really was just like a thousand cuts.”
He considered buying the store from Minton but decided that was not what he wanted to do with his life. So, he enrolled at Jacksonville State University, finishing in 2013 with an accounting degree.He worked in the accounts payable office at Steris Instrument Management Services in Birmingham for a few years, then joined Boatner & Pugh, an accounting firm in Gadsden. “Being mayor here by nature is a full-time job with part-time pay, and that’s why I’m very selective about the places I work,” he says.
Early political career
Mostella’s first foray into politics was in 2012, when he was elected to the Ashville City Council. His motivation to run for office came from some of his experiences while working at Teague Hardware, where he heard people complain about city government without offering any solutions. “Hearing how much they cared about the city and all the things they wanted for it just motivated me to get involved and to try to see some of these things through,” he says.
His frustration with the way city government was being run prompted him to run for mayor in 2016. “The one thing that I learned in being on the Council is that Ashville never had a cash-flow problem, we had a cash management problem,” he says. “We were run inefficiently. We had an antiquated way of doing everything.”
He didn’t have a picture in his head of the way he wanted Ashville to be or to look like, he just wanted people to get more involved, to take ownership of their town, and to realize its potential. “I wanted to empower people and let them know that the City of Ashville should be a reflection of what the people who live here want it to be, not (a reflection of) one person who sits at City Hall, not the mayor or the City Council. What we should be striving to do should be a reflection of what the people of Ashville want to see.”
One of Mostella’s earliest projects during his first term was to revamp the city’s employee handbook. Working closely with the Council and City Clerk Chrystal St. John, he re-wrote the old handbook that was simply a photocopy of one belonging to another city that had nothing in common with Ashville. “We had no pay scales, no job descriptions, nothing like that, so we had to start from scratch on a lot of stuff,” he says. “We revisited literally every policy and procedure, every city ordinance, that’s on the books.” The update resulted in pay raises for many employees.
Mostella talks with city
employees after a Council meeting
His second term got off to a bumpy start, however, when a pair of candidates who fell short in the general election sued their opponents over alleged voter fraud. Former Mayor Robert McKay sued Mostella, while McKay’s nephew, Randy McKay, sued Councilwoman Sue Price. Mostella and Price breathed a sigh of relief when the pair dropped their lawsuit after three days of hearings at the St. Clair County Courthouse.
With a lot of input from local citizens, the same team that revamped the employee handbook is reworking an old, 20-year Comprehensive Plan to cover the next 20 years and developing a five-year strategic plan. Those plans include a new library, revamping downtown’s image and updating the city’s parks systems.
The city purchased the Alabama Power Building on U.S. 231 Southwith the intention of moving the library there. They shifted gears when they discovered that the medical building next door, which the city already owned and had been vacated by Dr. George Harris when he consolidated his offices in Springville, was more suitable. Bids for its renovation are still out. The process will be helped by a $100,000 donation from David O. and R.L. Louisa McCain, a couple with deep roots in Ashville. “David is from Ashville, and his wife was heavily involved in the Shelby County Library System,” Mostella says. “They recently moved back to the area, read the original newspaper article about our library plans and wanted to help.” The former Alabama Power Building was leased to the state’s Pardons and Parole Board for five years, and the lease money is paying for the building.
Mostella caused a minor uproar when the city tore down the old rock building at the corner of U.S. 231 and Sixth Street. It was necessary, he says, to accomplish the facelift he wants to see around the Courthouse Square. That facelift includes updating the sidewalks and increasing the turn radius at the traffic light to accommodate the large semis that come through. To do that, overhead utilities will have to be moved a block.
The city will build a pocket park where the rock building stood, incorporating some of the rocks saved from the building as well as the historic mounting block that stood in front of it. Plans also include updating signage, some of which is almost unreadable in places, and repairing sidewalks, which are buckled and have grass growing in the cracks in many places.
Retail shops have come and gone around the Courthouse Square for several years, and part of the problem is absentee ownership of the buildings there, according to Mostella. A lack of parking and publicity have contributed to the retention problem, too.
The city purchased an old gas station behind the former Ashville Drugs building and tore it down to provide more parking and has contacted the state highway department about signage near the Ashville I-59 exit. Meanwhile, several of those buildings were purchased by local people recently, and the city hopes to make announcements soon regarding new shops and businesses moving in.
“One of the problems we fought downtown was thatthe property owners weren’t very heavily invested, and I think the city has to take a large part of that responsibility because we haven’t progressed and created an environment down there that’s conducive to a business surviving,” Mostella says. “No parking, not a whole lot of aesthetics there. The flow of it doesn’t work from one side of the street to the other, there are no crosswalks painted, you’re literally dodging 18-wheelers at times, so we never put in the work to really build it up.”
Mostella believes the city’s futurelies in residential growth, and that people will see Ashville as an alternative to what he calls “big-city living” in Springville. The city’s approach under his administration will be to keep that small-city feel without the small-town mentality. “We wanted to play up the small-town feel but modernize our approach to it and get somemodern amenities for our citizens who may never have experienced something like that, and for the other generations that are coming along, where green space and pocket parks is not a foreign language,” he says.
Eventually, he plans to upgrade the city’s parks system, which includes the City Splash Pad Park and D.O Langston Park (in front of City Hall), maybe even hire a parks and recreation director. That upgrade will include more green space, more walking trails and replacing outdated equipment at the splash pad.
“Half of the equipment at that park was there when I was a kid,” he says. “We haven’t replaced it because I think it’s an inefficient approach to just go in and say, ‘Hey this piece of equipment is old, let’s put another one in its spot,’ when we need to be looking at the park as a whole.”
He says the city has the capital and the potential to do so much more now than it did four years ago due to better money management.
“My saying has always been that I just want Ashville to be the best version of itself that it can be,” Mostella says. “I’m not here to dictate what that is, I’m here to make sure that we do so efficiently and that we do so together.”
Story by Elaine Hobson Miller Photos by Graham Hadley
Some folks get their kicks riding race cars at top speed around an oval track. Others get a rush from parachuting out of airplanes, paragliding off high mountain peaks, or surviving an eight-second ride on a bull so mean he’d just as soon kill you as look at you.
Several St. Clair County men know another type of thrill, one that’s difficult for them to describe. It comes from taking down an elephant that he has tracked for miles across a South African plain, a lion that just roared from a brush-pile 12 feet away or an Alaskan brown bear that was about to invite him to dinner … as the entrée.
Between them, Rob Smith, Gordon Palmgren and Joe Wheeler have shot hundreds of birds and animals, large and small, from grouse to sheep and elephants. Each will tell you that it’s not the kill that provides the thrill. It’s the sighting and tracking of these animals that give these guys that rush of adrenalin, a rush so powerful they’re willing to spend thousands of dollars to experience it over and over again. For them, pulling the trigger is actually anti-climactic.
“After you shoot, it’s all over,” says Smith. “There’s a tinge of sadness because you’ve taken this magnificent animal’s life.”
All three men have been hunting most of their lives. Two of them were taught by a female member of their family. Smith, for example, went on his first hunt with his grandmother when he was 10 years old. “She was one of the last of the old pioneer women,” he says. “She could do anything.” They hunted rabbits and squirrels together around Tallahassee, Fla., where he grew up. They usually took their prey home and ate it. “Man has always hunted,” he says. “It’s part of our basic instinct. As you get older, you start hunting deer here in the South. I progressed.”
Rob Smith shows off a photo of a brown bear hunt in front of the animal.
Smith, who started Advance Machinery in 1985 and retired 20 years ago, has been hunting big game for more than 30 years. His first international hunt was in Mongolia in 1990, and netted him an ibex, a type of wild mountain goat distinguished by the male’s large, recurved horns, and a six-point elk. Their cape mounts (head and shoulders) hang on one side of his den fireplace, while a 22-point red stag from New Zealand hangs on the other side.“You only count one side of the head for the points on an elk,” he says. “You count both sides for a red stag.”
Throughout the house are mounts of many of the animals Smith has taken. Above the fireplace is the skull of a moose, an animal whose size is measured by the distance between the widest points of its “palms,” the two wide, flat antlers. This one measures 55 inches. Mule deer from Wyoming and Montana flank the doorway into his kitchen. But the dominant animal in the den is the nine-foot-tall brown bear from Alaska in the corner. “He was standing like that when I shot him, looking at a herd of caribou,” Smith recalls. “He didn’t know what hit him.” He has the creature’s skull, with worn teeth indicating he was about 28 years old. “His teeth were deteriorating, so he would not have lived through another winter,” Smith says.
Hunting has taken him all over the North American continent and around the world. He has shot Arctic caribou on Victoria Island, which is above the 60th parallel and as far north as people actually live. “It was 20 below zero there, dangerously cold,” he says of that trip. He has taken white-tailed deer in Alabama, Dall sheep, bears and mountain goats in Alaska, Russian wild boar in South Carolina, tahr (related to goats and sheep), sika deer and chamois (a species of goat-antelope) in New Zealand.
“You’ve got to be physically fit to track the mountain animals,” says Smith, who is 69. “I was much younger, and my knees were in better shape when I killed those. You might climb 5,000-6,000 feet up a mountain. You’re carrying a backpack and a rifle. I have weights and an exercise machine in my basement, and I work out almost every day. But I don’t climb mountains anymore.”
He considers the elephant one of the most physically demanding beasts to hunt. “You have to walk 10-12 miles a day for two to three weeks, sometimes longer,” he says. “You may track a herd for two or three days, catch up and find no bulls big enough to take. Then you start all over again.”
His trophy room contains several photos of game that were too big to mount, like the Indian buffalo from Argentina and the water buffalo he took in Australia. In 1993, the state of Montana sent him a plaque for shooting the second largest antelope killed there at that time. There’s a musk ox fur stretched over the pool table, and 12 mounts hang on the walls. “You mount them to honor the animal, to remember them,” he says. Smith uses Stone Taxidermy of Leeds for most of his mounts.
He has hunted Africa and Australia for the last 12 years, because he likes the challenge of tracking dangerous game (buffalo, elephant, lion, hippopotamus, crocodile and leopard). “The animal has as good a chance to take you out as you have to get him,” he says. His primary prey now are the elephant and the cape buffalo. He has a mount of the latter over the doorway from his foyer to his trophy room. “The rhinoceros is now on the endangered species list due to poaching, so we can’t hunt them,” he says. “Poachers kill them for the horns, sell them to the Asians, who grind them up and use them as an aphrodisiac.”
Poachers hunt in secret and leave the carcasses, but legitimate hunters donate the meat to local villagers, usually through the outfitters who organize the hunts. “When do-gooders start hollering, ‘Why would you shoot a magnificent animal like the elephant,’ I say it’s no different than shooting a cow,” Smith explains. “That elephant will feed a whole village for weeks or months.” He says it’s against the law for villagers to shoot the elephants because the government makes money off the trophy fees. “There’s not an animal in this house that wasn’t eaten, except for the bear. Brown bears are inedible.”
Even in Alaska, you can’t just leave the meat where you drop the animal. In some cases, Smith has had it processed and shipped home from Alaska, but usually he packs it out. “It took me four days to backpack all the meat out (of camp) when I took that big moose that’s hanging over the fireplace,” he says. “You can’t drive a truck up to get it. The outfitter donated it to the indigenous people and to charities.”
Normally Smith does two or three international hunts a year. Much of the money spent on hunts in the U.S. and abroad goes into animal conservation. “Even in this country, the biggest part of conservation money comes from hunters’ fees,” he says. “Besides, nature has to have checks and balances. Most animals get diseases from interbreeding. If they have no natural predators, they starve.”
Unlike Smith, Gordon Palmgren won’t shoot an elephant, unless it’s a rogue that’s running amuck through villages and fields. “I don’t want to disrupt their family unit,” he says. “They are special.” His wife, Sharla, does not want him to shoot a giraffe. Those are about the only two big-game animals not on display at his office.
In fact, the conference room at Gordon Palmgren Inc., which lays fiber-optic cables, looks like a natural-history museum. Murals on the back and front walls depict an African plain and the face of a rugged mountain, respectively. Painted by Springville’s Joy Varnell (see the October/November 2019 issue of Discover), they form backdrops that make the full-body animals appear to be in their natural habitats. Elephants and a giraffe are painted into the African mural, along with Palmgren’s two sons, depicted as youngsters peeking from behind a tree.
“I took Dane, who is now 30, to Africa when he was younger,” says Palmgren. “He shot a (large species of antelope) when he was 10. Travis, 35, is an artist who has never hunted, but he’ll come up here and draw pictures of the animals.”
Other animals in front of that mural include several types of antelopes, such as a sable, along with two steenboks, two duikers and a musk ox. There’s also a zebra, a lion and lioness, an impala, wart hogs and forest hogs, a bush buck (another type of antelope), a pair of monkeys, some baboons and a 14-foot-long crocodile. An Arizona javelina (type of wild boar) is placed incongruously amid all those African animals, but he doesn’t seem to object. The straw-grass at the base of many mounts has been chewed short by Sylvester, the office’s live feline mascot.
On another African wall are more full-body monkeys and the cape mounts of a rhinoceros, cape buffalo and another sable antelope. “The Safari Club International has a system of scoring your kills by length of their horns,” Palmgren says. “There are three levels: bronze, silver, gold. That sable is the only animal I’ve shot that’s in a (record) book. For a year it was No. 7 in the world.”
A lot of hunters won’t shoot an animal if it’s not a huge, gold-medal trophy, but Palmgren doesn’t hunt to get into record books. “I do it for the fun, the challenge, to see different places,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of the world.”
On the other two walls hang dozens of cape mounts, such as spiral-horned kudu, a red hartebeest (African antelope), a gemsbok (another type of South African antelope), a moose from British Columbia, several elk out of Colorado, a bison from New Mexico, a water buffalo from Venezuela, a caribou from Greenland, a mountain goat from British Columbia, a tahr and a chamois from New Zealand. Still another wall has full-mounted mountain goats, a tahr and a chamois standing on ledges that jut out from the wall.
His mounts spill over into his office and lobby, too, including a full-body mount of an aoudad (Barbary sheep) shot in Texas and a nyala (spiral-horned antelope of southern Africa). The latter stands in a corner under a pencil drawing of a tiger done by Travis. A zebra skin is displayed on another wall. In his office stands an eight-foot-tall blonde brown bear. Who knew that brown bears are a species that come in various colors? Or that the grizzly is a subspecies of the brown bear? “Grizzlies are inland, whereas brown bears are coastal,” Palmgren points out.
He uses Capps Taxidermy in Demopolis to preserve his trophies. “Mounting them in foreign countries, you don’t know the quality, he says. “It’s not as good as here. Shipping home life-size animals is especially high, so the hide and horns are all you take home to the taxidermist. Generally, you only mount the cape, which is from front shoulder forward. To me, though, with certain animals, you miss so much with just the cape.”
Like Rob Smith, Palmgren, 69, started hunting as a child. His mother gave him a .410 shotgun when he was 12. “We used to hunt squirrel and other small game together,” he says. A big-game hunter for 25 years, he bought his first trip to Africa at a Safari Club International convention in Las Vegas in 1996. He has been to Africa five more times since then. “It’s like potato chips, you can’t do just one,” he says. “It’s such a thrill. It’s the chase and the challenge. You will go back.” He hasn’t been there this year but has spent his spare time developing a piece of hunting property he bought in St. Clair County.
In African countries, governments there require that you have a local guide, called a professional hunter there. Hunters go out in groups that include trackers and skinners. “The 10-day rate varies according to exclusivity of the animal and his dangerousness,” Palmgren says. “It can be $1,500 per day to $3,000-$4,000 for more dangerous animals, such as lions and elephants. Every animal has a trophy fee attached, too. Supply and demand determine those. There are also government fees.”
Although hippopotamuses kill more people than lions in African countries, tracking a lion still is a dangerous proposition. Palmgren found that out the hard way on the trail of a lioness in South Africa. “I had spotted her, then she got away, and I was using binoculars to spot her again,” he recalls. “I walked by a room-sized brush pile, heard growling, then a roar from 12 feet away. She was in that brush pile. I shot her, but I also found out how I would react to a dangerous situation. I didn’t think I would ever quit shaking.”
Joe Wheeler and the brown bear that almost got him.
Joe Wheeler had a similar experience with a blonde brown bear, but it was much more personal than Palmgren’s. The bear was trying to snare him for her lunch and managed to sink one of her powerful claws into his hand.
“I was watching some wolverines and got a funny feeling that something was watching me,” he says. “I turned around and she was in attack mode. I shot her in the mouth, which knocked her down. She got up, and I got off a second shot into her neck, and she went down again.”
As he was reloading his rifle, her left claw dug into his right hand. Working from instinct, he turned around in the opposite direction to avoid that claw dragging through a ligament. As he did, she slapped him across the back with her other paw. He got off a shot to her heart. She ran 60 yards, forcing him to track her. She was dead when he got to her. “That’s the only female bear I’ve ever shot,” he says. “She’s mounted in the same position as when I first saw her.” She’s crouched in a corner at the top of the stairs in his Gun South Inc. (GSI) office in Trussville.
In a hallway of the first floor, he has another brown bear, a wolf snarling on a tabletop, bobcats fighting over a pheasant and a pair of Alaskan wolverines. “Pound-for-pound, wolverines are the most vicious animal alive,” Wheeler says. (Wolverines resemble small bears but are actually the largest member of the weasel family.) He has a wolf-skin rug stretched out on a wall in the office at GSI. On another wall is a pair of ptarmigan(type of grouse) he shot in Sonora, Mexico.
Wheeler, 77, started hunting rabbits, quail and squirrels with his uncle as a kid. He killed his first deer when he was 14. It had eight-points. “I went to Bud Jones’ house (in Tallapoosa, Ga.) and skinned it there in his back yard, and he mounted it,” Wheeler says. “I still have that mount. It’s probably my favorite.”
He made his first trip to Alaska in 1972, killing a caribou and a moose. He has gone twice a year ever since, sometimes to hunt, sometimes to fish. In addition to bears, wolves and wolverines, he has killed siska deer, pocka squirrels (similar to prairie dogs) and Arctic hare. Due to the pandemic, he probably won’t return this year. He has taken his two brothers, his two stepsons, and several other St. Clair County men with him on several trips. In fact, he took Gordon Palmgren on his first hunt to Alaska and got him his first bear.
“I was a registered guide in Alaska from 1984 to 1998 or 1999,” he says. “Licenses were for five years when I started, but they changed that to three years, and I didn’t get the notice in time, so I accidentally let my license expire. I would have had to re-test, and I didn’t want to do that.”
An Alaskan hunt usually lasts 17 days and involves a lot of walking. “If it’s a bear hunt, you’ve got to find the bear with a spotting scope,” Wheeler says. “You can see for eight miles through the scope, and if you spot one within five miles, you go after it.”
He has hunted big game in Canada, Montana, Colorado, British Columbia, Alaska, Texas, Mexico and parts of New England. He has been wing-shooting (bird hunting) 15-16 years in a row in Argentina, Nicaragua and Honduras. He has shot spur-wing and Magellan geese in the Yucatán Peninsula, and jack rabbits in Argentina so big that if laid across a horse they would drag the ground. “I tracked one running at 64 mph one night,” he says. “I could not bring it back to mount because of some disease.”
He used to have a lot of mounts in his Pell City Steakhouse, but the women employees there prefer seeing historic photos of the Pell City area, so he obliges them.
In the gunsmithing room at GSI, a wholesale gun dealership, Wheeler has the capes of a mouflon sheep from Austria, an elk from Saskatchewan taken with a bow, and a caribou his stepson, Danny Spann, shot in Alaska.
“The tips of the mouflon’s horns were worn off from where he rubbed them on rocks so they wouldn’t poke him in the eyes,” Wheeler says. “It’s called ‘grooming.’”
The elk is called a 7×7 because it has seven points on each side of its head.
“Only one caribou in 10,000 has a double shovel (flat, front points), and he’s shot three,” Danny says of Wheeler. “We were fortunate to see tens of thousands of the Mulchatnaherd of caribou in Alaska.”
Hunters in Alaska are required by the state’s Fish and Game Commission to pack out the meat or face a fine and the possible loss of a guide’s licenses. “One time we had all the meat in elk bags and a bear got some of it in camp overnight,” he says. “Fish and Game did not want to accept that we hadn’t hauled it all out, but I had made photos before and after.” Like Rob Smith and Gordon Palmgren, he always gives away the meat. “We killed 125 geese in one day in Nicaragua,” he recalls. “We put them on a wall in the town square, and they were gone by the next day. The natives got all of them.”
Asked what he likes about hunting, he cites being “out in nature, seeing things, making a lot of friends.” Take the bird boys who pick up the fowl that hunters shoot. “We (he and his friends) have gotten to see them grow up in Nicaragua,” Wheeler says. “We do a lot of personal things for them. We’ve sent them money for school supplies, candy, bought them shoes.”
He also likes teaching young boys to shoot, the way his uncle taught him, and he taught his stepsons. He’ll even take friends’ grandsons and nephews hunting, showing them how to track, read the signs, keep quiet and still, be patient and to enjoy the outdoors the way he does.
Wheeler probably will miss his 2020 trips to Alaska, thanks to COVID-19. He will still be able to hunt birds and small game on his own property in St. Clair, where he has a hunting club. After all, as he, Smith and Palmgren keep emphasizing, it’s not about the kill or the size of the trophy. It’s all about the hunt.
Story by Carol Pappas Photos by Carol Pappas and Graham Hadley and Glenn Wilson
Much like the single seed planted years earlier that grows into the towering oak tree offering shade and comfort to next generations, today’s Pell City Gateway Community Garden thrives as an example of what dogged determination, a patch of dirt and a smattering of seeds can become.
In 2013, a handful of Pell City citizens envisioned a garden for their community. In that group were Merry and Dave Bise, Renee Lilly, Lisa Phillips, Kelly and Sheree Wilkerson, and other community volunteers. Taking root on the old Avondale Mills property, the garden on a quarter-acre plot was small, but productive – just like their dream. Early help came from Pell City Civitans, which provided the nonprofit status they needed for grants, and the City of Pell City, which provided the patch of earth they needed to grow their bounty, and it began to sprout.
Seven years later – in a new location thanks to St. Simon Peter Episcopal Church – and a growing army of volunteers, Gateway Community Garden is reaping the benefits of what it sowed by helping others.
Early mornings and late afternoons nearly all year long, you’ll find a group of “do-gooders,” city dwellers on a mission, toiling in the dirt, nurturing their crops to feed the hungry.
Row upon row tells the story of their bounty – potatoes, okra, squash, bell peppers, corn, tomatoes, butter peas and pinkeye purple hull peas in summer. Collard greens, cabbage, turnip greens, broccoli, sweet potatoes and more okra emerge in the fall.
Fruit trees and bushes abound – apples, blueberries, blackberries – a future dream now in its fledgling stage. An irrigation system is in place. A greenhouse, courtesy of Master Gardeners, has been erected. And on any given day when the sun is out, chances are these gardeners are, too, watching over their harvest like protective parents tending to their young.
Debbie Smith, a longtime gardener and board member, calls it “God’s blessing. It is always amazing to me that you plant a seed in the ground and get this beautiful plant that feeds others.”
Lisa Phillips logging hours
Her experience as a gardener is rewarding in the way she is able to use her education background to teach others how to plant, grow and harvest. She describes the end result – whether it’s someone enjoying the garden’s solitude and beauty or actually laboring in the soil as a “healing and restorative garden. It works on both ends.”
Worth Barham, project manager who fellow volunteers have labeled ‘CEO,’ agrees. “It’s a wonderful experience,” he said, noting that the whopping two tons of food grown there so far have made their way to good homes in the Pell City Christian Love Pantry, Pell City Senior Citizens Center and Lincoln Food Pantry.
“Everything is based on the wonderful volunteers we have,” Barham said. Bringing different skillsets to the organization, they have been able to write grants, develop an educational component, bring community organizations into the fold, design the garden’s physical future and of course, grow food for the needy. St. Clair Co-op has provided many of the plants. David Wadsworth brings his tractor to clear the ground for planting, and Master Gardener Tom Terry tills the soil.
“Without the grants we have received, we would not be where we are today,” Barham said. “Without our volunteers, we would have no organization at all.”
Lisa Phillips became involved early on – first as a Pell City Civitan, then as a gardener. In addition to the Civitans lending their 501(c)(3) nonprofit status to the fundraising effort, the club has provided access for the handicapped and special needs, like accessible paths for wheelchairs and lower tables for produce.
To be a part of it has been “a great feeling,” said Phillips. “And I think it has been great for the community.”
“I am awestruck at what we have been able to accomplish with a small group of folks,” said Linda Tutwiler, another board member. Volunteers only number a dozen or so on a regular basis. “I don’t think any of us envisioned what we could accomplish in such a short time.”
In 2017, it moved from Avondale to a 5-to-6-acre plot given to them to use by the Episcopal church across the street. And that is when the garden grew to its next level and beyond. First helped by a Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham grant and then a Community Foundation of Northeast Alabama contribution as part of its Sacred Places grant program, the garden began to really take shape.
Three years ago, Barham said, the garden grew 820 pounds of fresh produce to give to those in need in Pell City and St. Clair County. Last year, it was 3,600 pounds. Today, their harvest tips the scales at 4,000 pounds.
Nearby is a newly constructed nature trail. A handcrafted, oversized sitting bench underneath the trees welcomes one and all as a place for quiet reflection. A journal to record thoughts is there, as is a miniature reading library. Peace, tranquility and reflection are key to this sacred space.
A greenhouse is home to trees that grow Meyer lemons and will soon grow plants from seed. A shed painted with brightly colored sunflowers holds tools of the trade and a work log, where volunteers record their hours for grants.
On a Saturday morning in November, a group of Scouts marveled at gardener Laura Wilson’s lessons of how sweet potatoes are grown, how to pick a turnip or cabbage leaf. They ran through garden patches with prize in hand – a freshly picked turnip – with smiles almost as wide as they were tall.
They earned a badge that day. But more important, gardeners will quickly tell you, is they learned the value of growing a garden with your own hands and what it can provide in life – not just for you, but for others.
Renee Lilly, one of the founders, talked of the personal rewards reaped in those lessons for her and her husband. “It’s a wonderful experience for me. My husband is involved, too. It’s a great thing for the community, and I’m excited the word is finally getting out,” she said, encouraging others to join them in the effort. “It really does take a village.”
