Way Back Wednesday in Calhoun County---March 7-13

With Spring Break rapidly approaching, everyone is ready to head out to a hotel to relax. It may be hard to believe but long-ago Calhoun County had four bustling towns that were vacation resort areas. After the Civil War, the railroad lines in the South were rebuilt and extended to allow for travel throughout an area that was once only accessible by horseback or foot. Where there was train station, there was also a hotel and Calhoun County was no exception.

Across the street from the Seaboard Railway station in Cross Plains (later Piedmont) was the Piedmont Hotel. The hotel, constructed around 1868, was a three-story wood structure. The hotel went through various name changes over the years, until its final years when it served as a rooming house. The structure met its demise in 1983.

A few miles down the road in Jacksonville, The Jacksonville Mining and Manufacturing Company built the Allegheny Iron Queen Hotel and stable near the town square in the 1880s. Unfortunately, like many hotels of the day, it was a casualty of the Panic of 1893 and was taken over as resident housing for the nearby State Normal School. By the turn of the century the building was revitalized as the Hotel Pelman, but only survived until 1917 when fire struck.

The largest hotel in the county was built as a summer resort by the Nobles in their newly opened-to-the-public town, Anniston. In 1885, The Anniston Inn saw the arrival of the first visitors just as Samuel Noble had planned. The Queen Anne-style inn was a 5-story structure that boasted wide verandas and 20 acres of gardens for patrons to wander through. If they tired of the grounds they could always walk to the street, catch a trolley car and go to Oxford Lake Park. Oxford Lake Park was a typical Victorian playground complete with horse racetrack, an opera house, boathouse, bath house, bowling alley, dance hall, and animal exhibits.

Like the Iron Queen, the Anniston Inn was a victim of the Panic. Over the years it served as a private school for girls and apartments. At the outbreak of World War I, the U.S. Army located Camp McClellan just up the road from Anniston. With this military addition to the county, the city of Anniston decided to renovate the hotel. The Inn was in operation until 1923 when it burned. The only part of the structure that survived the fire was the three-story kitchen annex. The kitchen was restored and still sits on the top of the hill across from Zinn Park.

As industrial businesses and the military moved into the county, the summer resorts gave way to more functional hotels like The Alabama, The Bevis, and the Jefferson Davis. Sadly, the sole survivor of these old hotels is the Jeff Davis on the corner of 13th and Noble Streets, which has been renamed the Homestead.

To learn more about the history of Calhoun County pick up a copy of Images of America: Calhoun County (ISBN 978-0738589985), Anniston (ISBN 978-0738506012), or Anniston Revisited (ISBN 978-1467114752) by Kimberly O’Dell.