| Summary: | (4:42) Mr. Ingram discusses his family and growing up on Walnut Street in Florence, Alabama. This interview is part of an oral history project funded by a grant from the Alabama Historical Records Board, managed by the Alabama Department of Archives and History staff, using funds provided by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with B.M. Ingram
July 7, 2009
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 1 of 9
Clint Alley: All right, well it’s July 7, 2009. I’m Clint Alley with Mrs. Rhonda Haygood, and we are here with Mr. B.M. Ingram, at Ingram, Incorporated in Florence, Alabama, and we’re going to ask him a few questions today. Mr. Ingram, I’ll start off by asking you when and where were you born?
B.M. Ingram: I was born January the ninth, 1921 in Florence, Alabama.
CA: So you’ve lived here your whole life, then?
BI: Well I was invited to join the Army for a while, but other than that, and going off to college, I’ve lived here.
CA: Ah, did you have a lot of brothers and sisters growing up?
BI: Had one brother, James. He was two years younger.
CA: So, ah, were your parents from Florence, as well?
BI: They were.
BI: So were my grandparents. Well, from Lauderdale County, let’s say.
CA: So your family has been in this area a long time, then?
BI: They have. They were here in Lauderdale County when the U.S. government ran them out. They, ah, they had moved in and, well, had, had Indians as friends, but the Federal government, in one of their negotiations, traded this area back to the Indians, and my great-grandparents had to move to Pulaski, Tennessee. Then they moved back when they, another treaty had the opening of the area around that crossroads, Elgin’s Crossroads. Elgin Crossroads used to be Ingram’s Crossroads. And the reason it was Ingram’s Crossroads was because there was a house that my great-grandparents lived in that was closest to that crossroads than anybody else. That was the reason it was named Ingram’s Crossroads. But we were out of town one day and they changed the name on us.
[laughter]
CA: You came back and it wasn’t Ingram’s Crossroads anymore, huh?
BI: That’s right.
CA: So, did you grow up here in town, in Florence?
BI: I did.
CA: What street did you grow up on?
BI: On Walnut Street. On the real thing.
CA: The house you grew up in, is it still standing?
BI: It is. It’s occupied now by Faye Vines. And, ah, Walnut Street is a wonderful street. It’s being maintained by the people that live there and it’s, I’m fortunate that I had the experience of growing up on Walnut Street.
CA: Did you have a lot of neighbors that you could play with as a child?
BI: I did. I did, and, ah, I was invited to the, a block party last week on Walnut Street, and they had all of these young kids there having such a good time it reminded me of about seventy years ago.
CA: Well did you have any chores or anything you did around the house?
BI: Well it sounds to me like you’re setting me up because they asked me that, the Times Daily asked me that at that Block Party. Ah, this was during the Depression, and so there was a shortage of everything, and one of the things I had was a cow. It, and I kept it there in the back yard at Walnut Street. Now, of course you couldn’t get away with that now, but we had that cow and I would go to school at Coffee High School, come back and get the cow and take it up there and stake it out. And, actually my cow did the mowing of the grass at Coffee High School.
[laughter]
BI: Now the Coffee High School was the one that burned, and it was at the end of Walnut Street, is what I’m referring to.
CA: So, you didn’t have very much of a walk to go to school, then, did you, when you were in high school?
BI: No, I would tell my granddaughters that I had to walk to school and finally they found out that it was a block and a half, so it wasn’t much.
CA: Has the downtown area changed quite a bit since you were a young boy?
BI: We, we were far, it was far ahead of what we have now. They had a street car, and the street car went down Poplar Street to East Florence, around by the UNA, and then down Court Street. And so you had this method of transportation, which was nice. You could ride all the way to Tuscumbia with the street car.
CA: Okay, so it crossed the river?
BI: It did.
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