REMEMBER WHEN – LakeLife 24/7 Magazine

Remember When: Legacies of Reich Hotel live on in Gadsden and Pell City

Story by Roxann Edsall
Photos by Mackenzie Free
Submitted Photos

In the heart of Gadsden, there stands an unassuming brick apartment building. It seems rather unremarkable for 2024, but if one were to step back in time just a few decades, to the year 1930, this same building was quite remarkable.

Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly visited the hotel

It was Feb. 12 at 10 a.m. when the doors officially opened for business at the swanky, 10-story brick Reich Hotel. Adolph Reich, the hotel’s owner, was commended by industry peers for the quality of the furnishings and décor. Dignitaries and guests celebrated Gadsden’s modern luxury hotel on into the early morning hours.

The hotel business had been a part of the Reich family since Adolph’s father, Hungarian-born David Reich, purchased Gadsden’s Printup Hotel in 1894. The Printup had been built by the Gadsden Hotel Company in 1888, in large part as a response to housing needs that resulted from the addition of the Rome-to-Gadsden branch of the Southern Railway. A train station was conveniently located across the street from the hotel’s lobby.

David and his wife, Lottie, owned and managed the Printup until David’s death in 1914. At that time, Adolph took over ownership and made major renovations to this property and began dreaming of building a more modern facility. The opening of the Reich Hotel 16 years later was the fulfilling of a promise made to his mother, that one day Adolph would build his dream hotel for Gadsden.

Gadsden, at the time, was an important port city. People and goods moved along the Coosa River, bringing much-needed supplies, guests and new citizens, many needing a temporary place to stay. The 1930 opening of the Reich Hotel was both perfect and challenging timing for Adolph’s new venture.

It was good in that the new Goodyear Tire Gadsden plant had just been built, and executives needed lodging. It was unfortunate timing in that the hotel opened just a few months into the start of the Great Depression. Despite the bleak times, the hotel thrived, and Adolph and the Reich Hotel became well known in the community. Reich’s hotel business continued to do well through World War II and into the early 1960s.

Wade’s father, Bobby, with a football ice sculpture

The Reich was the site of many social affairs over the years, ranging from weddings to high school proms. “I used to be a schoolteacher, and we had a lot of Christmas parties there at the Reich Hotel,” said Gary Garrett, president of the Etowah Historical Society. “It was beautiful. My mother was a hairdresser, and she used to have a lot of the beauty conventions there, too. I knew the son, Bobby, through my mother.”

Adolph’s son, Robert “Bobby” Reich had graduated from the University of Alabama and gotten into the hotel business himself, building the Guest House Hotel in Birmingham. Bobby eventually sold that hotel and returned to Gadsden to help manage the Reich Hotel.

By the mid 60s, the interstate highway systems made traveling by car more popular, and the hotel industry began to lean more toward “motel” type properties, downplaying the grand lobby style hotels. In response, Adolph took out a bank loan, and Bobby oversaw a major remodel of the Reich, beginning by tearing off the roof to build a patio and swimming pool and adding the additional comfort of air conditioning. Then a motel wing was added, and the name was changed to the Reich Motor Hotel. All rooms were refurnished with modern furniture. The old furniture was sent to the Printup Hotel, which Reich still owned.

Bobby’s son, Wade Reich, was in 7^th grade when they put in the pool at the Reich, and he remembers enjoying that. But, he admits, he had an even better time in the elevator. “I loved operating the Otis hand-crank elevator,” he says. “We’d crank it up to the 6^th floor and then let it drop to the lobby. Your stomach would be up in your throat. That was a lot of fun!”

The transition to the motor hotel model and the million-dollar renovation were the beginnings of the end for the Reich Hotel. Marketing the new motor hotel product did not go well. Bobby ended up selling his family’s Gadsden home and moving into the Reich Hotel to keep it afloat.

When that didn’t work, in 1972, the Reich Hotel was sold, and the family moved into the Printup. The hotel building is still standing, now renamed Daughette Towers and operates as a government-subsidized apartment building serving seniors and disabled adults.

With the Reich Hotel closed, Bobby and his wife, Jane, focused their efforts on the Printup Hotel. They converted a space where Mrs. Tarpley’s Flower Shop had been in the Printup Hotel and opened a small café they called the Whistle Stop. However, the new café wasn’t enough to revive the aging debt-ridden hotel, which was, by now, surrounded by vacant buildings. In December of 1973, the Printup checked out its final hotel guest.

The Reichs retained ownership of the building, offering spaces for ground leases, including a car repair shop, barber and beauty shops, a taxi service and a dress shop.

While Bobby and Jane focused on saving the Printup, their son, Wade Reich, completed his college degree in business administration and marketing. After graduation, in 1974, he and his parents painted the Printup lobby and opened a new restaurant called Poppo’s, the name paying homage to Wade’s grandfather, Adolph.

The restaurant stayed in business until 1978, when, Wade says, “it became apparent the future would be better for family if we sold the building.”

Having sold the building, Wade went to work for Dan Wallace, the inspiration for the movie Big Fish, whose company specialized in grocery store premiere promotions. That venture ended up sending him to London, which led to a new job with a similar business in Paris.

Wade and his wife, Jennifer, spent 14 years living in Paris. Although he loved Paris, Wade does have one regret. He never attended the famed Le Cordon Bleu culinary school. “I could have done Cordon Bleu, but I didn’t,” Wade laments. “It’s crazy! I’d spent countless hours taking customers to all the fine restaurants in Europe. I wish I’d done it.”

Wade and Jennifer returned to the Birmingham area in 2002 to be close to his aging mother. He worked in the grocery store promotions business again for a little while. Then a friend asked him to help run a gas station in Pell City. He came to run the Chevron station near downtown Pell City. Then, in 2008, he and his business partner bought the Texaco station across the street. In 2009, they started smoking butts and ribs there for holidays under the name Butts To Go.

In the 15 years since it opened, Butts To Go has been featured in several publications internationally, including The Toronto Star, USA Today, The Guardian (London), and in Southern Living magazine. They were also featured in the cookbook travelogue The South’s Best Butts by Matt Moore. In late 2021, Butts To Go left the Texaco, and after a brief partnership with The Kitchen, they landed in the old Dominos location on Mays Drive.

Wade has worked long hours all his life and admits to being a “tinkerer.” He started a new venture last year with his son, Eakin. By day, Wade works at Butts To Go, but at night, he’s busy helping wherever he is needed at The Grill at the Farm, a restaurant which opened just nine months ago off Logan Martin Dam Road.

Eakin returned to Cropwell from Key West, where he was food and beverage director at Jimmy Buffett’s famed Margaritaville Beach House Resort. Now he manages The Grill and is busy developing plans for the next stages of the property’s growth. “It owns me,” Eakin admits. “It’s been fun being here from the ground up. And it’s good to be near family.”

Plans for the future of the 62 acres the restaurant sits on are still in the development stages, Wade says. “We’re trying to figure it out,” he adds. “We have event space right now for 130 people. If we fixed up the barn and added a kitchen out there, we would be able to do bigger things. We’re still working on what it will be.” Whatever The Grill is or is to become, he says, “we wouldn’t be doing this if Eakin weren’t here.”

As busy as they are, the Reich family continues to give back to community that has supported their businesses. Recently, they helped with food for events for Dovetail Landing, a veteran transition and wellness facility being built in Lincoln, and for the Wellhouse, a home for female victims of human trafficking in St. Clair County.

Family, hospitality and community. The legacy now lives on through five generations of the Reich family.

Remember When: General Lee Campground and Marina

50 years and counting on Logan Martin

Story by Roxann Edsall
Submitted photos

Ask just about anyone who lives or plays on Logan Martin Lake for directions to General Lee Campground and Marina, and they’ll point you toward Treasure Island, across the water from St. Clair Shores.

The 16-foot-tall orange and blue Gulf sign easily identifies the campground and serves as a beacon for sunbaked campers coming home from a day on the lake.

Ashley Morton has never known a life that wasn’t heavily influenced by the campground, both the business end and the people who make up the community. She was born into the business, and it has matured alongside her. Now she and her husband, Scott, have continued what her grandparents and great grandparents built, managing the day-to-day operations of the campground at General Lee.

Craig, Ashley and Scott in front of a classic Gulf sign

Ashley grew up around the campground, spending most afternoons and summers helping her grandparents, Jean and Sonny (Floyd) Goodgame, with chores around the property. Jean made sure Ashley learned life skills while in her care. “Grand momma taught me what I know about handling money and running a business,” says Ashley.

“In the store, we played what we called ‘grocery games,’ where she would give me a $10 budget and tell me to bring as much food as I could buy with it. But I had to figure in taxes as well. We had fun and learned a lot.”

“My family lived really close to the campground, so my cousin, Blair (Goodgame), and I would ride our bikes to the campground to play,” continues Ashley. “It was so much fun that Blair and I would hide under a pier when they called us to go home. We didn’t ever want to leave.” To this day, summers at the General Lee are teeming with children. It’s a tradition of summer fun that Ashley hopes to share with her own two girls, 3-year-old Aspen and 9-month-old Presley.

Grand momma Jean made things fun for her grandchildren, but she also made sure they learned and practiced the right way do chores, like raking leaves. “Grand momma taught us that you don’t rake them into piles,” Ashley explains. “Of course, we did a little bit, so we could jump in them. But she taught us to rake them into lines so we could burn them safely.”

Leaf raking was, and still is, a never-ending need at the campground. The beautiful trees that provide much-needed shade in the summer relentlessly cover the roads with leaves in the fall and winter months. It is those trees around which the children ride their bikes and conduct squirt gun battles and play hide and seek games in the thick of the summer heat.

And around those trees are nestled the campers and tents that house visitors in spring, summer and fall. There are 111 camping spots, some with full sewer hookups, and others with just water and power. A bathhouse, store with bait and covered storage round out the amenities.

People have been enjoying the amenities at the General Lee since just after the impounding of the Coosa River, which created Logan Martin Lake in 1965. Jean and Sonny, along with Jean’s parents, Clarence and Pauline Lee, built the campground and marina, which opened in 1966, originally selling Chevron gas. Shortly thereafter, they changed to Gulf brand gas and erected the sign, which, though the oil company went out of business in 1985, still stands today.

For people around the lake, that sign has become a landmark. “People tell me all the time that they find their way here by looking for that sign,” laughs Ashley. The marina no longer sells gas, offering only a boat launch and dry boat storage.

“My parents and grandparents built the campground together,” said Craig Goodgame, Ashley’s dad, and owner of the campground. “I was just three when they opened, so, like Ashley, I grew up helping and learning about the business my whole life. It was a great playground. I remember having a good time with the kids who were here at the campground, playing our made-up games of crow and snake.

“When I was a bit older, I used to work all day on the gas island,” he adds. “I’d lather up with suntan oil and lay out on the island until a boat came up for gas. Then when they left, I’d get back to sunning.” He also admits to slipping off while he was supposed to be working, on occasion, to ski with whoever was running a ski boat nearby.

In those days, the campground was run by Jean, Craig’s mom, and Ashley’s grandmother, along with Jean’s best friend, Nita Staggs. “Nita and Grand momma did everything that was needed, from pulling out trailers to launching boats. They had an old Willys jeep to pull things in or out,” remembers Ashley. “Everyone thought they were sisters because they were always together. When Nita passed away from cancer in the late `90s, Grand momma ran it alone. She worked seven days a week.”

“Mom was a very, very hard worker,” said Craig. “There used to be a game room and a hot dog hut and an ice cream counter. Then, later, when they sold the hot dog hut, they added an ice cream hut. We still rent kayaks and canoes, but we also used to rent tubes. My mom ran all of that.” These days, the hot dog and ice cream huts are gone, replaced by a picnic area that doubles as an entertainment space that often features live music.

David Burrage has been camping at the General Lee for 54 straight years. He is from Hueytown and camped and fished at the General Lee every summer with his family as a young boy. “I remember my dad would go to work from the camper, and my sister and mom and I would spend our days playing on the lake,” Burrage said. “I brought my own kids here every summer, too. Now that they’re grown, they still come some and bring my grandkids. It’s very family oriented. Everyone watches out for each other.”

Providing a place to make family memories are what Ashley and Scott Morton hope to continue to offer at the General Lee Campground and Marina for many years to come.

And, in case you were wondering, the General Lee is not named after the noted Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The general in this name is Ashley’s great grandfather, Clarence Lee, not a military general, but a man, his family says, who had many of the leadership qualities of a general and ran his world with similar decisiveness.

Brothers 4 Motel & Big Bull Steakhouse

Revisiting uniquely Logan Martin lodging

Story by Roxann Edsall
Photos by Mackenzie Free
Contributed photos

Soon after the impounding of the Coosa River in 1964, the sparkling waters of the newly formed Logan Martin Lake started drawing in visitors from around the state and beyond. Fishermen and families looking for a respite from the rigors of the work-a-day world came in droves to enjoy some form of recreation along the water’s edge.

A young entrepreneur from Pell City recognized a need in this new lake community and set a plan in action to fill that need. Charles Abbott was already entrenched in the community as part owner of the local radio station, WFHK, now known as 94.1, The River. He sold his interest in the radio station and, with the help of his uncle, J.D. Abbott, secured a bank loan to build a motel and restaurant in Cropwell on the shores of the lake.

Iconic Big Bull Steakhouse neon sign in Pell City

Being a strong family man, Charles thought it only fitting to name the new venture Brothers 4 Motel after his four boys. The sign off Highway 231 featured stacked silhouettes of the four brothers, David, Dennis, Joe Paul and Danny. The family moved into the apartment at the end of the building, and the new motel welcomed its first guest in 1965.

Danny Abbott still has his silhouette from that sign as a memento of the family business he helped operate. A graduate of Pell City High School, Danny remembers the pros and cons of working at the business while being a student.

“My brothers and I worked hard on the grounds and often cleaning the rooms. Dad set up a schedule for each of us to work in the office when we weren’t in school,” Danny recalls. “I saw my buddies having fun at times that I couldn’t. But in those days, if you had a boat, which we did, you had friends. We had a lot of fun on the lake.” And so did their guests.

“Dad felt like people would come from Birmingham (when the lake opened), and they did,” adds Danny. “We had lawyers and doctors who would come every weekend and request the same room week after week.” The Columbia University rowing team came down one winter to practice. They’d put their sculling shells in and paddle to the dam and back. Danny still has the broken oar they signed and gave to his dad.

Because Charles had the foresight to have the water trenched early on for deeper water access, they were able to build docks and a beach with a swimming area. Sliding glass doors in each room looked out onto the lake and allowed each guest lake access. Several guests would leave their boats docked at Brothers 4 through the summer.

“We also had the band, Question Mark and the Mysterians, as guests one time,” Danny tells. “You remember their one big hit, ‘96 Tears’? Well, Question Mark was known for never taking off his sunglasses. I remember a day at the motel when he forgot to put them on, and his band mate had to remind him.”

When the Alabama International Motor Speedway, later named Talladega Superspeedway, opened in 1969, many more guests came to stay. The motel was filled with press staying to report on the races. Danny remembers several drivers checking in for a stay, including NASCAR legend, Tiny Lund. NASCAR Hall of Famer Buddy Baker was another frequent guest. “Buddy actually completely rebuilt his engine in the parking lot of our motel once,” Danny remembers.

Four brothers and little sister, from left, David Abbott, Dennis Abbott, Joe Paul Abbott, Danny Abbott and Jennifer Abbott Martin

The Brothers 4 Motel was also a leader when it came to telecommunications. “Our motel had the first automated phone system in the county,” says Danny. “The rooms for the motel were connected to that system so that rather than having to go through a telephone operator, we could connect a call directly from the office.”

At meal times, many of the motel guests headed next door to the Big Bull Steakhouse Restaurant. Charles never operated the restaurant he built, but leased it to Bob Mulvehill, who later bought it, along with the motel.

Locals remember the iconic neon sign featuring a charging bull, which stood outside the restaurant for just shy of 50 years. For three years, it was operated as Chilly Williy’s Sports Grill and Bar; then in 2017 it was sold and is now Courtyard Oyster Bar and Grill.

When Charles began building the motel and named it, he didn’t know he and wife, Maxine, were about to become parents again, this time to a little girl. After their daughter, Jennifer, was born, he opened a new business on the property and named it Little Sister’s Laundry.

He’d gotten tired of paying the high prices for laundry services for the motel’s linens, so he opened his own laundry facilities. Ironically, that business soon became so popular with locals and hotel guests that he didn’t have time to do the motel linens and had to send them out again.

The success of that laundry prompted him to buy three others in Eden, Pell City, and Southside.

Cleaning and servicing those laundry facilities on top of their other chores kept the four brothers busy. Jennifer, now Jennifer Martin, remembers going with the boys and helping empty the coins. “They’d set me up on top of the machines, and I’d dump the coins out,” she recalls. “Then I’d go home to roll the coins.”

When she wasn’t rolling coins, Jennifer remembers hanging out with the families who were visiting. “I’d try to join as many picnics as I could,” she laughs. “I loved fishing, and sometimes they’d take me fishing with them. I also remember eating ice out of the ice machines and getting in trouble for that.”

Jennifer also remembers enjoying the winter when the water was drawn down. “I loved to collect those shells at the bottom of the lake. We didn’t get to go to the beach, so I thought they were wonderful.”

Vintage post cards from the early days at 4 Brothers Motel on Logan Martin Lake in Cropwell

Charles Abbott sold the Brothers 4 Motel and Big Bull Steakhouse Restaurant in 1972 to Bob Mulvehill, who operated it as Big Bull Motel. Since then, it has changed hands several times. The building has remained largely unchanged and is now called Lake Front Motel.

After selling the motel, Charles kept busy with his four laundry facilities and a new antique mall he’d opened near Interstate 20. The family was stunned in 1985 when he passed away from a heart attack at 58 years old.

Their mom, Maxine, continued to run her clothing store for a number of years and lived to age 87. Two of the four brothers (Danny and Joe Paul) still live on the lake. Jennifer moved away, but recently returned.

“Perseverance was one of the greatest lessons I learned from my family and the businesses,” says Danny. For him, the lessons learned were priceless. “Watching mom and dad work together was inspirational. They never got away from it, but always worked it out.”

“Dad was a very smart guy,” says Danny. “He was very giving and did a lot for the community without making it known.” Charles Abbott served his community well as a leader and an entrepreneur.

The Brothers 4 Motel served the community well as a home away from home for some of the first visitors to Logan Martin Lake.

Easonville before the lake came

‘We were a mile from the Coosa River, so we knew the water would get us.’

Sue Clinkscales Granger has a lake house. Her house, which sits next door to John Abbott’s, became waterfront when the waters of Logan Martin rose. Though she lives in Jacksonville now, she visits her Cropwell place frequently and remembers well the chaos that came along with the rising waters.

Growing up, she lived in a different house, one that was directly in the path of the floodwaters, and her family was not happy about it. “The surveyors would come by putting in stakes, and my granddaddy would come by and pull them up,” said Granger. “We were a mile from the Coosa River, so we knew the water would get us.”

Continuing, she recalls, “I was away in college at Jacksonville State (JSU). I remember coming down and going swimming as the water was coming up.”

In the end, they sold that home for $6,000 and built a house in Pell City.

Longtime Pell City resident Dianne Fisher tells a similar story. She was in first grade when her parents had to move their home out of the path of the future lake.

Her family’s home was not far from John Abbott’s home, just about 100 yards into the center of what would be the lake.

They had it jacked up and moved to higher ground in 1963.

“My mother cried when they cut down the trees. They were huge, beautiful old oaks.”

Four months after they had the house moved, they sold it and moved into a house they had built in Pell City. The old one that was moved has long since been torn down.

“In the end, it was OK,” admits Fisher. “I have four brothers. Once we got into our bigger home, we all had our own bedrooms, and it was easier. And we were closer to town.”

Remember when: Easonville

A look inside the Mansion of the Valley

Story by Roxann Edsall
Photos by Richard Rybka

If walls could talk, the stately 18-room lakeside home would speak volumes. Once called the “Mansion of the Valley,” it was well known in the community of Easonville and was home, at one point or another, to several of the community’s most prominent families.

It stood in the heart of Easonville, a busy farming community on the outskirts of its big sister, “Pell City.” But by the 1950s, people in Easonville began to hear rumblings of something in the works that was to change them forever.

John Abbott with picture of grandfather’s store

In June of 1954, then President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law legislation that paved the way for dams to be built along the Coosa River for the purpose of producing hydroelectric power.

Construction on the second of those dams began in 1960 and would be called Logan Martin, after William Logan Martin Jr., a circuit court judge, Alabama’s attorney general and attorney for Alabama Power Company. The resulting impounding of the Coosa River would form the 15,263-acre reservoir known as Logan Martin Lake.

The “Mansion of the Valley” is one of just a handful of homes still in existence today that survived the onslaught of water that consumed the sleepy community of Easonville. Known now as the Maddox-Abbott home, it only survived by being moved, as many were in that day. Unlike most of the others, though, its only movement was up. To keep it safe from the coming waters, workers raised it by two and a half feet and skirted the bottom with brick.

“My earliest memory of this house was as a young kid at Easonville Methodist Church,” says current owner John Abbott. “We’d be going home, and I’d ask my dad to drive us through the driveway here because it looked haunted. I was scared to go up there on my bicycle.”

It was not haunted then, nor is it now, reports Abbott. It is, however, filled with some fairly fierce-looking creatures. An avid game hunter, Abbott has filled the rooms with trophies from his various exotic hunts and has stories to tell about each of the mounts, like the bear that leans out over the sofa in the living room, teeth bared. Coming out from behind a waterfall, that one, he tells, almost got him.

Beautiful millwork highlights the craftsmanship of the historic home. Currently configured as a four bedroom, five bath home, it features a reading room, formal living room, a formal dining room, office, kitchen and a large porch facing the waters of Logan Martin Lake.

The home is filled with antiques, which Abbott admits to having hated as a youth. “My mother made me sand them and get them ready for her to refinish,” he recalls. “It was a lot of work.”

The Maddox-Abbott home was built by William Notley Maddox for his new bride, Minerva, and was completed in 1914. It would have been completed earlier had it not been for Maddox’s generosity and his support for the local Methodist church. Those facts were revealed to Abbott many years later by a writer whose own grandfather helped Maddox build the house with pieces from a mail-order house kit.

Easonville Methodist was building a new church at that time, and Maddox, a church trustee, gave the building team all the support beams that were in his house kit. He had to reorder those beams in order to begin construction of his home.

Abbott bought the house 25 years ago, in part, because he had always been interested in its historical significance and beauty, but also because of the history it shares with his ancestors. Among the other dozen or so owners was another Abbott, a distant relative. Robert Edgar Abbott and his wife, Eliza, owned the home for several years before selling to the J.L. Manning family in 1928. Other Easonville notables to own the “Mansion of the Valley” were G.W. Ingram, Kathleen Gholston and Loyze and Mavis Roper.

Kathleen Gholston was an Easonville schoolteacher who owned the house when John Abbott was just a boy. During that time, she closed in the two sleeping porches and outfitted them as rental apartments. Abbott’s uncle, William Abbott, rented one of those apartments while building his home in Birmingham. Gholston eventually sold her home when talk of the impounding of the Coosa River began.

She sold the house to the Ropers, who continued renting it out. Among their tenants was Abbott’s uncle, Ludford Harmon. Abbott visited the mansion in the ’70s when his Uncle Ludford used it as the venue for the wedding of his daughter, Abbott’s cousin Vivian.

John Abbott has lived in the Pell City area all of his life. He has seen a lot of history being made around him. He watched with curiosity as the community of Easonville was displaced and dismantled to make way for the impending flood of water. His father, J.D. Abbott, bought the Easonville school building and tore it down to save the lumber to use in his homebuilding business.

“I was about 13 or 14 going to school in Pell City,” recalls Abbott. “I remember my dad and Charles Abbott, Pick Cosper and Booky Fraim moved a lot of dirt, building up places for Easonville homes to be moved to and to make places to build new ones.”

The home that he grew up in was moved to one of those built up lots in what is now Rock Inn Estates. His grandmother Abbott’s house was also built up to bring it high enough to withstand the rising water. The home of his maternal grandmother is no longer standing but was on the property that is now being developed as Easonville Park subdivision.

The Maddox-Abbott home is not the first meeting of the two families. The same Maddox who built the home Abbott now owns also built the cotton gin that Abbott’s uncle, Ludford Harmon, bought and had to move before the floodwaters came.

As a business owner for most of his adult life, Abbott understands the sense of loss the landowners and business owners felt when they had the choice to make of moving their buildings or selling out.

But, he adds, they did eventually see that property values went up as the water came up.

As he sits on his screened-in porch, looking out at boats going by, he knows the sacrifices that were made that allow him to continue to enjoy this old home – this piece of history that no longer sits in a valley, but that stands proudly on the edge of the waters of beautiful Logan Martin Lake.