Cherry Street Historic District
Alabama
Cherry Street was laid out in eighteen eighteen, the year Florence was born, along the town's eastern edge. The houses you see came much later. Florence stayed a modest cotton port until the late eighteen hundreds, when mills, iron furnaces, and the Florence Wagon Works drove a hunger for middle class homes.
Most of this district rose between the late nineteen tens and the mid nineteen thirties, a second boom fueled by the building of Wilson Dam and a huge nitrate plant nearby. Bungalows lined the blocks, and apartment buildings sprang up to house the rush of new workers, clustered at a corner nicknamed Angel Corner, after the developer J. M.
Angel. The Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Thomas Sigismund Stribling captured this very street in his novel The Store.
