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Photos courtesy of Marjorie White.
This photo from the book shows the creek as it flows through Bluff Park.
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Photos courtesy of Marjorie White.
The Ross Creek railroad culvert, built in 1863-64, is pictured in the new book “Shades Creek: Flowing through Time.”
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Photos courtesy of Marjorie White.
The cover of “Shades Creek: Flowing Through Time,” published in February.
After more than three years of work, the newest book from the Birmingham Historical Society, “Shades Creek: Flowing Through Time,” will be released in February. The book, which documents the creek’s relationship over the years with the communities through which it runs, is authored by Marjorie White and will be the first major identification and research book done on Shades Creek.
The research for the book found a total of 57 crossings or “gaps” through Shades Creek’s 55.8 miles, spanning three counties and through cities such as Birmingham, Irondale, Mountain Brook, Homewood, Hoover and Bessemer to its confluence with the Cahaba River.
Over the course of 216 pages, local contributors, editors, landscape architects, geologists, geographers and historians take the reader through the ways the creek has shaped many areas of Birmingham, in addition to how people, including those in Bluff Park and Ross Bridge, have played a role in shaping it.
“For Bluff Park, the vision was that it would be a great residential area of great beauty. The planner used [Shades Creek] and planned a great city of the future that runs down from Ross Bridge,” White said.
White said the researchers and field guides took time to explore the area of Shades Creek that flows at the base of Ross Bridge and Bluff Park.
Due to upstream development of the Bluff Park area, the book shares findings about how stormwater started to reach the creek more quickly, with less of it being slowly absorbed into the soil. The resulting surges caused and still causes the stream banks to erode and extensive root systems of trees to collapse.
The book also documents the amount of shopping bags, bottles and trash carried from the Bluff Park community through the creek. Although it says this as an ongoing problem, the book also shows the history of how the Ross Bridge community and Renaissance Birmingham Ross Bridge Golf Resort & Spa put strategies in place to reduce some of the effects of development.
White said the Historical Society began the project by gathering teams of volunteers to find and photograph the creek crossings to collect maps. They were surprised to find many of their locations were largely unknown and in the middle of wilderness areas. They were also able to find and document historic locations like the Civil War-era “Ross Bridge,” which is more accurately described as a railroad culvert tucked into the Historic Park at Ross Bridge.
This is the first book she knows of, White added, to chronologically list the environmental steward groups who evolved to preserve and protect the creek, in addition to the many preserves and parks that have been created over the years.
“We tell the story of the people that advocated for the creek,” White said.
After years of exploring the creek’s path from mountain tops and underground passages, 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 stormwater after seeing these pictures and coverage of the creek.”
On Feb. 25, the book will be released at 7 p.m. at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens during the annual meeting for the Birmingham Historical Society. Members receive a complimentary copy of the publication. For more information on the society, go to bhistorical.org.