Mountain Brook: Creek Hunting Ground to Birmingham's English Village
Near Birmingham, Alabama
Shades Valley, draped along the south slope of Red Mountain, was Muscogee Creek hunting territory for millennia. Creek towns dotted the rivers of Alabama until eighteen thirty-six and eighteen thirty-seven, when roughly twenty thousand Muscogee people were forcibly marched to Indian Territory in one of the deadliest episodes of the removal era.
The valley passed into the hands of early Alabama settlers. The ridge above it sheltered Birmingham iron works after eighteen seventy-one, but the forested coves below stayed largely farmland and woodland.
In nineteen twenty-nine, developer Robert Jemison Jr. hired Boston landscape architect Warren Manning to design Mountain Brook across Shades Valley's wooded ravines. Manning's plan called for winding scenic roads that followed the natural contours, estate-sized lots, and three village centers he styled after English market towns, giving Mountain Brook its signature look. The three centers are English Village, Mountain Brook Village, and Crestline Village, and Jemison began developing the land along the Red Mountain and Shades Mountain ridges that same year. The city that incorporated in nineteen forty-two remains today one of the wealthiest communities in Alabama, its curving streets still tracing Manning's original survey through the old Creek woodlands. The city counted twenty-two thousand four hundred sixty-one residents in the twenty twenty census.
