Story by Leigh Pritchett
Photos from Phyllis Murphy; John Lonergan Jr.; Vicki Davis Mize
(her collection from her time growing up across from Avondale Lake)
From his back deck, Thomas Ingram Jr. can look through treetops to a spot far down the shore of Logan Martin Lake and see Avondale Lake.
Or rather, he can see where Avondale Lake was when he was a boy.
“Growing up, we had free range to roam,” said Ingram. He would walk or ride his bicycle across his family’s farmland to get to Avondale Lake.
Ingram lives in Pell City on a portion of that same farmland. Now, though, acres upon acres of Logan Martin cover most of the farmland and have engulfed Avondale Lake.
The one part of Avondale Lake that did not disappear when Logan Martin formed are the memories of fun, adventure and special times that happened there.
“I have a vivid memory of it,” Gerald Ensley of Cropwell said about Avondale Lake. “I can see it all.”
Avondale Lake and a large farm surrounding it were the property of Avondale Mills in Pell City. Avondale Mills purchased them from Grover C. Waite, the Easonville businessman who had developed the lake, notes the May 19, 1955, St. Clair News-Aegis.
According to a 1947 issue of Avondale Sun (the newspaper for Avondale Mills), Avondale Lake was about 15 acres in size. It had been acquired “chiefly” as a water source for the Pell City plant, yet quickly had become a popular recreation site.
The lake, its recreational amenities and the dairy that operated on farmland at the lake were added to a long list of provisions that Avondale Mills gave employees of the Pell City plant. Numerous sources said the company provided houses in the “Mill Village,” a hospital, school, laundry, barbershop, clubhouse with concessions, sports facility and activities, outdoor movies and entertainment and cookouts, among others.
“They took care of everybody,” said Ensley, a member of a mill family and a mill worker himself for a time. “… They were good neighbors to the town.”
Pete Rich, whose mother Pauline, taught decades of children in Avondale Mills’ kindergarten, agreed. “The Comers – they really cared about people.”
(The Comer family owned the mill; Comer Avenue in Pell City is named for them.)
David Murphy of Pell City, whose work at Avondale Mills covered decades and two states, said the company established recreation areas wherever it had a plant. For many years, the company also operated Camp Helen, a retreat in Panama City, Fla., that offered an affordable family vacation option to Avondale Mills employees.
Rich was a lifeguard at Avondale Lake during high school and at Camp Helen while in college. He described Avondale Lake as “a busy place,” where people could swim, fish, picnic, bowl and camp out as scouts.
“You could play volleyball, badminton, horseshoes,” added Ingram, a historian and retired educator who taught at Avondale School early in his career.
Joann Winnette of Pell City said the building that housed the bowling alley also included dressing rooms, a concession area and a dance floor with a jukebox. When she went to the lake as a young girl, “the only restroom at that time was a two-holer (outhouse),” she said with a laugh.
At the lake were a dock, diving board and paddle boats. The picnic area, with pavilions and barbecue pit, was a frequent meeting place for scouts, 4-H Clubs and other groups, Ingram said.
Vicki Davis Mize, Julia Skelton and David Murphy’s wife, Phyllis, each remember going there for church picnics. Phyllis Murphy said a creek served as a refrigerator to cool the watermelons.
“Occasionally, we went there as a class,” Mary Isbell of Pell City said about students at Easonville School, where her dad, Lester Bryant, was principal. “… (Highway) 231 wasn’t even a paved road then.”
Rich emphasized that it was quite an attraction. “Avondale Lake was a big thing. … It was about the only place there was back then.”
Ingram said Avondale Lake drew visitors from other areas. “People came all the way from Sylacauga up here to go to the lake.”
The Avondale Sun article goes even further, calling the lake “one of the most popular spots in Alabama for persons seeking relaxation and pleasure.”
Even though Avondale Lake was technically for mill employees and their families, “the whole community from Mount Pisgah to Cropwell went,” said Randall Harmon of Cook Springs. “… It was just a good place to hang out for young kids.”
Many of Harmon’s youthful, summer days were spent swimming at Avondale Lake. He lived in the Mount Pisgah-Easonville area at the time and would hitchhike on Old 231, when necessary, to get to the lake. “It was safe to do stuff like that then.”
Around 1947 or 1948, Avondale Mills bought a school bus and provided a shuttle service from the Mill Village to Avondale Lake during the summer, Ensley said. “Jellybean” Clemons drove the bus and transported families to Camp Helen.
Avondale Lake “was a pretty nice place in those days,” said John Lonergan Jr. of Chula Vista. “… I went there from the time I was old enough to wade in the water until I was 8. I learned to swim there, too.”
Lonergan once rode his bicycle on Old 231 all the way from the Mill Village, where he lived, to Avondale Lake. The only reason he stopped going regularly to the lake was because the City of Pell City, in the 1950s, built a pool on 19th Street South. The pool was not far from the Mill Village.
While Avondale Lake was a fun place to Lonergan, he said he also had a harrowing experience. One day, he fell off the inner tube on which he had been floating. He remembers being on the bottom of the lake looking up and a lifeguard pulling him to safety. He believes that lifeguard was either Pete Rich or French Whitten.
Phyllis Murphy reminisced about special times of being at the lake with her sister Joan Deason and their dad, Norman Smith. “We were little. Daddy would usually swim with us.”
Many churches, Winnette said, held baptismal services at the lake. “Nobody, except maybe First Baptist, had baptistries at that time.”
Winnette, Harmon, Isbell and Mize are a few who were baptized in Avondale Lake. Winnette, in fact, was baptized when it was Waite’s Lake before Avondale Mills acquired and renamed it.
“Lots of people in Pell City were baptized there at Avondale Lake,” Mize said. “I have a picture of my daddy (the Rev. Harvey L. Davis) baptizing me at Avondale Lake.”
A useful resource, too
Not only did the lake property provide outdoor recreation and dairy pastureland, but it also boasted a working grist mill. The mill was situated next to a spillway of the lake.
“We would shell our corn in the barn, put it in a tow sack, and we would take it down and grind it on the shares,” Ingram said. (“On the shares,” he explained, meant the grist mill received a portion of the ground corn as payment for services rendered.)
People could stand on a ramp at the mill to watch lake water rush in from the spillway to turn the mechanisms that ground their corn, Ingram explained. Afterward, the water was discharged down a steep slope into a creek.
“Now, that was fascinating,” Winnette recalled.
What was even more intriguing to Ingram was the replica of a World War II B-29 bomber hanging over the grist mill doorway. Ingram said the replica was six to eight feet in length with an impressive wingspan. He wanted that model badly. “But they wouldn’t let me have it.”
Adventures aplenty
The memories that Glenn Evans of Pell City has about Avondale Lake are of the hours spent hunting on some rear acreage. He said his dad, James Evans, who was plant manager at Avondale Mills, would let him hunt there occasionally in the late 1960s.
Ingram, too, has Avondale Lake hunting stories – one in particular about opposum-hunting with his uncle Grant Watson. He said Watson put the captured critters in a croaker sack that Watson flung over his back. That was until the opposums grew antsy and began biting Watson through the bag.
One of Avondale Lake’s more slithery characteristics was its snake population.
Mize, who does not like snakes at all, is amazed that she could enjoy swimming in the lake. Jokingly, she said, “Nine-thousand snakes were killed in that lake.”
The environs had their share, too.
Lonergan said he was walking with a group one night on the road around the grist mill and saw 13 snakes.
It was not unusual, Ingram said, to see snakes in the vicinity of the scout camp – the same area where he and others would soon be sleeping on the ground in tents. “You’re camping out and snakes crawling around!”
Harmon had an up-close encounter when he and a friend went frog-gigging one time. In a flat-bottom boat left at Avondale Lake, the two friends floated along looking for frogs. As they did, a water moccasin kept circling the boat. Harmon’s friend got the bright idea to gig the snake. After he did, he held the snake right over the head of a surprised, scared and scrambling Harmon.
Spring-fed lake
Avondale Lake was clean, with fresh spring water flowing through it constantly, Harmon said.
“(It) had a lot of springs in it that were cold!” Winnette added.
The spring activity was quite visible, according to Ingram. “(You) could see water just bubbling up.”
The lake was a good fishing spot, too. Lonergan recounted a time that he fished at a second spillway at the back of Avondale Lake, caught a catfish and ate it for supper.
The second spillway drained excess water if the lake level rose too high, Ingram said. That spillway fed Harmon Lake, which was created when overflow from Avondale Lake was dammed. Tol and Stella Harmon owned the Harmon Lake property.
Beyond Harmon Lake laid Easonville Creek and then the Coosa River, which was narrow enough for Randall Harmon to swim across it as a boy. He explained that the spring water that fed Avondale Lake traveled from one waterway to the next until it eventually reached the river.
Although the spot where Avondale Lake sat is a distant sight from Ingram’s back yard, another portion of the Avondale Lake property is close and readily visible. Ingram pointed to houses directly across Logan Martin Lake and said that they sit right where Avondale Lake’s scout camp was.
Rich, Lonergan and Ensley – like Ingram – have adventures to tell about camping at Avondale Lake as scouts.
“I thought it was the most wonderful place in the world,” Ensley said, “especially for an old country boy who hadn’t been anywhere.”
Ensley said the scout camp existed many generations before Avondale Mills acquired it. When Avondale Mills bought the property from Waite, the camp had crude log cabins. Avondale Mills made improvements.
Scouts from other parts of the country where Avondale Mills had plants would come to the camp too, Ensley said.
Arthur “Chick” Moore oversaw the camp property, as well as the lake and farmland, and had such an integral role that his name frequently is mentioned in Avondale Lake stories.
Ingram said Moore lived on the premises, and Mize said Moore and his wife hosted community gatherings at the lake.
Randall Harmon’s wife, Vicki, said Moore sat in a certain chair looking out at the lake while people were swimming. He was “always laughing and talking and carrying on with us.”
Moore would hire young people to work part time in the summer. Ensley got to be one of them, a “clean-up boy,” around 1953 or 1954.
As a child, Mize went to Avondale Lake “just about every day during the summertime.” Sometimes, her mother, Rebecca Davis, went along to fish. But Mize’s parents did not mind if Mize went to the lake unaccompanied because “they trusted Mr. Moore.”
The store that Mize’s parents operated – H.L. Davis General Merchandise – was right across the road from the lake’s gated entrance. The store was a frequent, snack-buying stop for lake visitors.
Cherished among Mize’s collection of photos of that time in her life is a picture of her dad reclining on a chaise lounge, the gate to Avondale Lake prominently in the background. She commissioned local artist Wayne Spradley to create for her a painting of the gate.
Just as the 1960s were a time of great revolution, drastic changes came to the landscape during that time.
In a project to develop the Coosa River, Alabama Power Company formed Logan Martin Lake and put Logan Martin Dam into operation in August 1964.
Logan Martin Lake grew vastly wider than the Coosa River had been, consuming great expanses of land and encapsulating both Avondale Lake and Harmon Lake.
H.L. Davis General Merchandise was under water. The home next to it – where Mize and her parents had lived – was sold to Ludford Harmon, who established a mobile home park. What once had been the driveway to the home became a boat ramp, Mize said.
As for the pastureland at Avondale Lake, Glenn Evans said it is now River Oaks subdivision. The deep part of Logan Martin Lake in the slough of River Oaks is Avondale Lake.
Avondale Mills continued to operate in Pell City for another four decades, before closing in 2006. Its altitudinous, brick smokestack and most of the buildings have since been demolished. The iconic water tower, though, still holds a prominent place in Pell City’s skyline.
The creation of Logan Martin Lake did claim a lot of farmland (hundreds of acres from Ingram’s family alone) and covered sites brimming with memories. But Ingram observed that much good came from it. The lake and dam now generate electricity for people in Alabama and other states. In addition, the lake is a popular fishing and recreational outlet that, in turn, generates revenue for local businesses.
“Alabama Power dammed it for a business venture, and it turned into much more than that,” Ingram said.
In many ways, he said, all the recreational and commercial benefits of Avondale Lake were just a “mini version” of what was to come with Logan Martin Lake.
Additional assistance with this article provided by Danny Stewart and Susan Mann of Pell City Library; Patti Sims and Linda Sims.
