Historical Society book chronicles city’s relationship with Shades Creek

After three and a half years of work, the newest book from the Birmingham Historical Society, “Shades Creek: Flowing Through Time,” authored by Marjorie White, will be released on Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens during the annual meeting for the Birmingham Historical Society.

Over the course of 216 pages, local contributors, editors, landscape architects, geologists, geographers and historians take the reader through the unending ways the creek has shaped the many areas of Birmingham, in addition to how people and suburbs in the city have shaped it.

White said the Shades Creek Project Team is just as enthusiastic about the book release now as when it first ventured out along the creek in 2015.

“The story is all about what happens to the creek. There are things that tick off the people who live there, and there are things that tick off the environmental community, much of which is birthed to deal with issues along the creek,” White said.

The research for the book documented a total of 57 crossings or “gaps” through the narrow valley holding Shades Creek, which they officially measured to be 55.8 miles long. It spans Birmingham through Irondale, including Mountain Brook, Homewood, Hoover and Bessemer, going into Jefferson, Shelby and Bibb counties to its confluence with the Cahaba River. 

White said they first started the project thinking it would just involve photographs and maps, but it soon became evident that the “story” of the creek involved much more than the hard facts. 

“In the meantime, we discovered quite a bit of history we needed to delve into, as well, so the book got more complicated,” White said. Ultimately, they decided to start at the geology 330 million years ago.

White said the team was surprised to find many of the creek’s gaps and coordinate locations were largely unknown and in the middle of wilderness areas throughout Homewood, Mountain Brook, Hoover and even some of Shelby County. 

Although much of the creek has been channelized at this point, the portion of it in the public areas of Mountain Brook in Jemison Park remains natural and flows into a lake, White said, largely because of the “heroic” efforts of the group, Friends of Jemison Park. By planning the development of Mountain Brook around the creek, and “planning in harmony with nature,” White said, the creek was saved from channelization. In the other areas of the creek that flow through the suburbs, that wasn’t the case, White said.

“The creek though Mountain Brook remains a beautiful area,” White said. 

The book also discusses the history and discovery of why the majority of Shades Creek—the portions that don’t run directly through cities—has been preserved from the very beginning, from Native Americans’ peaceful occupation with it, White explained, as well as the Birmingham industry engine skipping right over it, since it didn’t have valuable minerals.

Then, it goes into the earliest found map of the creek from 1820, and continues through early settlement, the Civil War, then “visionary plans for a region in harmony with its natural surrounds,” as the book explains, to post-World War II development and finally to the present day, which involves flooding and channelization. 

An important proponent to the text, she said, was making sure it was easily readable and able to be understood by most locals, which White feels they accomplished. 

This is the first book she knows of, White added, to list chronologically the environmental steward groups who evolved to preserve and protect the creek, in addition to a list of all the many preserves and parks that have been created over the years. 

The Friends of Shades Creek played a major role in preserving the area and also in the project, she said.

“We are the Historical Society; we tell the story of the people that advocated for the creek,” White said. 

After years of exploring on top of mountains for aerial views, to underground passages to find where the creek meanders, and then a few more years of fact-checking, White said, “this has been a journey of discovery where you might think twice about dropping your bottle, so it runs down the storm water, after seeing these pictures and coverage of the creek.”

Even though the biologists had written off the creek as heavily polluted, White said, they have discovered through research for the book that the biodiversity in the lower regions is slowly increasing.

In Mountain Brook, the book is available to buy at the Leaf & Petals shop at the gardens. Maps and photographs will be exhibited in the Library Gallery at the gardens from Feb. 25 through March 31. 

To learn more about the BirminghamHistorical Society, go to bhistorical.org.