Landmarks of DeKalb County
Landmarks of DeKalb County, Inc. (Landmarks) is a nonprofit historical association dedicated to preserving historic sites and archival materials in DeKalb County. Currently, Landmarks maintains an archive and oversees eight historic sites: the Fort Payne Opera House, the Hosiery Museum and adjoining Richard C. Hunt Hall, the Fort Payne Cabin Site, the Council Bluff School, Willstown Mission Cemetery, Beeson-Scott Cemetery, and the former mining community of Battelle.
Landmarks is overseen by a board of trustees who manage all organizational decisions and by an executive director who organizes the day-to-day operations. The organization maintains a docent for the Hosiery Museum as well as an archivist to manage their collected materials, which consists of paper materials, such as newspapers, books, and photos, and physical objects, which are largely hosiery-related. As a private, nonprofit 501c3 corporation, it is funded through memberships and donations, the sale of historic publications, and through events held at their historic sites. The group was organized in 1969 to preserve what has become their most toured historic site, the Fort Payne Opera House, when local state sesquicentennial celebrations inspired a renewed interest in the building.
The Opera House is a historic building from the city’s short-lived “boom” era when New England speculators invested heavily in Fort Payne to foster a new coal and iron industry, leading to rapid economic growth for the town. The Opera House, opened in 1890, fell into disrepair following the end of the boom in 1892. Over its lifetime of use, it had served as a theater for live performances and silent films, a school auditorium, and the home of several stores and businesses. By 1969, when it was selected as the headquarters for local celebrations of Alabama’s sesquicentennial statehood (commemorating 150 years of Alabama statehood), it had been reduced to a storage warehouse.
During the sesquicentennial festivities in July, which saw some 3,000 visitors touring the Opera House, local civic leaders formed a movement to preserve and restore the historic building. In the following month, co-founders James Ray Kuykendall (Fort Payne pharmacist and lifelong historic preservationist) and Vera Beck (noted civic leader in multiple local organizations) established and incorporated Landmarks of DeKalb County, Inc. During a meeting that same month, attendees elected Kuykendall as president and Beck as vice president. Board member Ruby Jo Mitchell was elected treasurer, and physician George Irving Weatherly Jr. and James “Corky” Wright were elected as directors.
Soon after, the newly formed organization held a public meeting to gather support among Fort Payne residents for the project. At the meeting, the group decided to hold a membership drive to raise the necessary funds to purchase the building. Landmarks’ membership grew rapidly, and by the end of September, the organization had raised enough money to secure the building. On October 2, 1969, Leona Davis, who had owned the building for 53 years, signed the deed over to Landmarks, and the preservation of the Fort Payne Opera House officially began. The restoration of the Opera House was the first major preservation project led by Landmarks, and it cemented the role the organization would play in their community into the future.
The preservation of the Fort Payne Opera House has led to decades of ongoing historic preservation. It remains open for tours and once more hosts live performances, including plays and improv sets performed by members of the community. Their next major preservation project began in 1973 with the Fort Payne Depot. Fearing it would face the same fate as the Birmingham Depot, which was demolished in 1969 after it was no longer in use as a station, Landmarks led the effort to preserve the historic 1891 train depot. The organization had succeeded in listing the site on the National Register of Historic Places (1971), along with the Opera House (1970), but fears remained over its survival without organizational oversight. By 1984, Southern Railway officials were ready to discontinue operations in Fort Payne, and in 1985 they donated the building to the recently formed Landmarks of DeKalb Museum, Inc., an organization under the umbrella of Landmarks that was created specifically to preserve the depot and transform it into a museum. Today, the Fort Payne Depot Museum is a separate entity open to the public and features exhibits on county history and daily life.
Since the restoration of the depot, Landmarks has been involved in a number of preservation projects. In 2000, the organization partnered with members of the local chapter of the Hosiery Association (formerly the National Association of Hosiery Manufacturers, a global trade organization that advocated for hosiery manufacturers) and opened a museum dedicated to preserving the history of the former “Sock Capital of the World.” (The nickname was given to Fort Payne for its once-thriving hosiery industry). Located next to the Opera House, the Hosiery Museum features machinery and memorabilia chronicling Fort Payne’s sock manufacturing industry throughout the decades, from the first hosiery mill opened in 1907, up to the mills of the early 2000s. The museum, located in downtown Fort Payne, adjoins another property owned by Landmarks, Richard C. Hunt Hall, which hosts exhibits that highlight DeKalb County’s wider history.
Other preservation efforts undertaken by Landmarks include the preservation of the Fort Payne Cabin Site, a certified site on the Trail of Tears Historic Trail. In 1838, the cabin was used by U.S. troops as a fort during the forced removal of the Cherokee people from Alabama. Today, all that remains of the original cabin are the chimney, a foundation outlined in stones, a stacked stone well, and remains of a small root cellar. Landmarks also maintains the Willstown Mission Cemetery, another certified site on the Trail of Tears Historic Trail. The mission school, an 1823 remnant from the Cherokee Nation, no longer remains, but the cemetery, which contains nine marked graves and another 50 unmarked graves, is still intact. The other sites preserved by Landmarks include the Council Bluff School on Sand Mountain, (the last one-room school building in DeKalb County), the historic Beeson-Scott Cemetery, and Battelle (a former mining community located at the foot of Lookout Mountain near Valley Head). The organization also maintains an archive (located within the hosiery museum) consisting of the county’s historic records and artifacts and makes them accessible to the public.
In addition to preserving physical places, Landmarks also preserves oral histories, recorded events, and genealogies through its publications. And, the organization collects this material through local interviews, outside archival research, and donations from the public. Their first published work was the 1971 book A Pictorial History of DeKalb County. Its publication helped to fund restoration efforts for the Opera House and began an enduring tradition of making DeKalb County’s history accessible while raising funds to preserve the county’s historic sites.
A full list of the preservation projects maintained by Landmarks, with visiting information for each site and a list of their publications, can be found on their website.
