Character built in years ago
Livability added in due time
Story and photos By David Moore
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ou’ve heard it said as a compliment of things that are old: They don’t build ‘em like that anymore. That, in part, is exactly why Bob and Kathy Weathers love the old house they bought back in 1981 on Emory Avenue in Boaz. On the flip side, because it was built like it was, is precisely why they’ve remodeled five times. The end result is a house with great bones and old charm that’s customized to their modern needs, taste and lifestyle. The house was built in 1917 by G.M.E. Mann, whose fingerprints were all over Boaz even before it was named. In the 1880s, the Albertville man was the first to pounce on an offer by early settler Billy Sparks, who was giving away free lots in his Sparkstown settlement – on what would become Ala. 205 and Main Street – to anyone who would build a business on it and live there. Mann built and opened a smooth-planked general store there. He went on to establish a post office in his store and become the community’s first postmaster. The post office was licensed in 1886 as Boaz, a name which Mann had submitted to the federal postal agency. The railroad came in 1892, and that same year he built what, for the day, was the lavish, two-story Mann Hotel across from the new depot. When his hotel burned in 1916, Mann salvaged what lumber he could, along with ornate porch posts and spindles, and used them in building a home on Emory Avenue, which remained in his family until 1936. 38
FEBRUARY | MARCH | APRIL 2022
G.M.E. Mann built the Weathers’ house in 1917. The porch posts and spindles were among the wood he salvaged from his hotel when it burned in 1916.
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mong those living there before Bob and Kathy were Cecil Cole and Dr. Kermit Andrew Johnson, the latter a Boaz native who served from 1968-77 as president of the University of Montevallo. The Weathers’ bought the house in 1980 from now-retired Marshall County Circuit Judge David Evans. David owned it briefly, thanks to his former real estate father-inlaw, who was Bob’s uncle. Even before they moved in, it was
necessary to remodel the outdated kitchen and bathroom downstairs. The major modernization required ripping off plaster from walls and pulling up old flooring. “When they took off the original plaster to install Sheetrock, they found 4x4 beams instead of 2x4s,” Kathy says. “When the workers started on that first remodeling project, they found that newspapers had been used as attic insulation,” Bob adds. “Some of those papers dated back to 1917.”
