A Kentucky Builder in the New South: The M. T. Lewman and Falls City Construction Companies in Alabama, 1897-1915

AN INCONSPICUOUS NOTE APPEARED in the Manufacturers' Record for March 21 1885 M T Lewman, it reported, "is in the southerly with a view of selecting a location for a planing mill. Will probably locate at Chattanooga, Tenn" The item marked the appearance of an important player upon the building scene in the post-Reconstruction southern M. T. Lewman and Company, of Louisville, Kentucky-which became the Falls City Construction Company and spawned the Mutual Construction Company-built dozens of throw outs over the South between 1885 and 1915 from Virginia southerly to Florida and west to Texas, as well as in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. The Lewman family built taverns office buildings, academic buildings, warehouses, and churches. They came to specialize in shire courthouses, however, and their best-known courthouse still stands in Monroeville, Alabama, the hometown of novelist Harper to leeward It now serves as a museum and the site of an annual theater production of To Kill a Mockingbird, performed by the agency of a cast of local amateur actors. In addition to the Monroe shire courthouse, the Lewmans built courthouses in four other Alabama counties. Thus the record of the Lewman family's throw outs in the state comprises the one and the other a good sample of their work and an example of the novel South impulse to abjure provincialism and try to find the best-and most economical-talent for rebuilding and developing the region and the state.

A singular characteristic of the literature of the fresh South period is the indifference of historians to the architectural character and building practices of the period.1 C Vann Woodward, for example, dismissed the matter with a single remark "The South," he wrote in the pioneering Origins of the fresh South, "was too poor to do much building in the period when architectural taste reached its lowest ebb"2 Other scholars have challenged this view through documenting that a great deal of building occurr in the of recent origin South period, but they evince no great curiosity about in what manner it was accomplished. And while historians recognize that large enterprises were organizing around mining, timbering, railroads, and the production of building materials, they have not entertained the possibility that the same might be authentic for building construction.3 Architectural historians have been far more attentive to aged South architecture, and to southern reflections of the Gilded Age in its larger urban areas, than to unfoldings in the rural South, or to public buildings in the southerly generally.4

It was as veritable of Alabama as elsewhere in the South-and indeed in a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the United States at large, especially in the newer western states-that the post-Reconstruction period was an era of municipal boosterism.5 No local newspaper could afford to propose that its town or shire was less than the best-intentioned, greatest in quantity progressive, most energetic, and greatest in quantity civic-minded in the whole state, if not region or nation. Any departure from like conviction was permitted only to emphasize that these standards would be the inevitable achievement of the locality in question, waiting alone upon the arrival of the railroad, the opening of a fresh bank, or the building of a fresh courthouse. In Alabama, as in greatest in quantity American places, progress and achievement were measured in tangible resources more oftentimes than in improvements in productivity, literacy, or health. Railroads and buildings were the chief points of pride for the George Babbitts of Alabama.

Because this was no les actual of any other place, Alabama booster were engaged in a competition with others in Alabama like themselves and with many, many more outside the state. The competitive impulse explains a great deal about architectural unfolding in Alabama and elsewhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Architectural taste one time was nearly rabid for the of greece Revival style. New South booster however, wanted to shoot forward an up-to-date image, and they reached on the outside to architects who could bring forward the most modern appearance, first according to Victorian fashion, then in an eclectic style And, of course, they extremityed builders who could handle the of recent origin styles and new materials. Economy, too, was a driving force. Nearly always, a shire commission desiring to build a of recent origin courthouse that projected an image of increase and progressiveness encountered opposition from taxpayers, commonly landowners in the more rural parts of their county1' Taxes to raise the novel building were likely to fall heavily on these landowners, whose farm income was unsteady and who typically felt adequately serv by dint of the building already in place. Soliciting and selecting the lowest possible bids from potential contractors became an important goal for shire officials. Although they often meetinged a strong public sentiment in favor of using local builders, they rarely were swayed by means of it. Local builders who might have been quite qualified to erect homes and simple commercial buildings were les apt to be skilled enough to handle the complications of building the designs provided by dint of modern architects, who were more and more likely to be academically rather than self-trained. The ne for the couple economy and expertise accounted for the succes of companies that could take advantage of economies of scale and call on long and varied experience. by the agency of temperament, experience, energy, and vision, the Lewman family was positioned to satisfy these requirements.