These are sick
11/3/04, 09:15 PM
#1
After all these years,
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The prices are not a misprint...... BUT you might get killed up before morning if you buy em. VERY bad town these are located in.
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/...0franklin.html
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/...n306water.html
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/uniont...rhopelgpic.html
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/...0franklin.html
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/...n306water.html
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/uniont...rhopelgpic.html
11/3/04, 09:17 PM
#2
After all these years,
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My C/T still sucks!
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Oh and my personal...
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/uniont...rhope488ac.html
These things are freagging spectacular. I lived near this hole playing green acres for 22 months.
http://www.billmackeyproperties.com/uniont...rhope488ac.html
These things are freagging spectacular. I lived near this hole playing green acres for 22 months.
11/3/04, 09:59 PM
#5
AKA 1 BULLITT------------ Legacy TMS Member
Are they all on Ellmore Street? 0:-)
11/4/04, 04:50 AM
#7
After all these years,
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Originally posted by jgsmuzzy@November 4, 2004, 3:29 AM
$44k, $40k, $850k! Why the massive price difference??
$44k, $40k, $850k! Why the massive price difference??
The other two are on the definition of super wrong side of town- BIG drug town ZERO employment. They were built back when cotton was big.When everyone left for greener pastures, the houses remained. Those houses are spectacular, I have seen them, problem is you can't live in em and remain unrobbed and alive, its why they have been for sale for years.
What happened is............I will not at all dispute that its a lovely town down there, I lived the next town up for 22 very long months. Down there its kinda like taking a time machine. There are 3 families, and they all marry each other, there is zero education(two public schools county wide, where you wouldn't send your worst enemy- rotting down, no education etc) and One private school where you pay over $500 a month and your kid doesn't learn anything but the latest movie on DVD. NO jobs unless you want to be in timber,become a contractor to repair the other rotted homes or travel 80 miles each way to another job. Therefore, you can have your own antebellum mansion for under $50K. The town I was in has the same for $80k, but its actually safe there. Nothing there but thousand year old widows who remind me of Bette Davis in hush hush sweet charlotte and creepy folk who hate you for invading their town.
So those who have a little bit of sense about them, flee. As I did. I came back home.I have been thinking of the green acres song since.
11/4/04, 04:51 PM
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Don't think you can.....Just gotta love em and mourn or move in them and get a couple dobermans and a gun or three.
12/14/04, 05:39 AM
#10
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I have seen these, If they were not where they were......I would buy 3. My parents can not give their place away- and its spectacular- 4br, 3b, 2 of everything- 2 living rooms, 2 dining rooms.......hardwoods, beadboard, ceiling tile, huge butt burning fireplace with handmade bookshelves built in the walls, extensive restorarion......But it is in scary alabama so........
Tara for a song
Black Belt filled with historic mansions at bargain prices
Sunday, December 12, 2004
CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer
UNIONTOWN - For less money than some mid-sized SUVs, a mansion can be yours.
The rooms are gigantic, the parlors formal, the white columns imposing. The price tag: a nonimposing $44,000.
The catch? Well, it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of catfish farms and poor people and other decaying mansions. This particular aging beauty - Uniontown's Co-Nita Manor, was built in 1906 for the town's doctor. It could use lots of paint and TLC, but it's easy to imagine the home at its peak, when windows were taller than NBA centers and floors were gleaming hardwood. One balconied room once held two billiard tables - with room to spare.
Throughout Alabama's Black Belt are scores of these bargain treasures, homes in their prime 80 to 150 years ago. Some have been restored; others cry out for a handyman.
Almost all have high ceilings, built-in bookcases, heart-pine floors, porches galore and massive pocket doors.
None, not even an 11,000-square-foot Italianate landmark, cost as much as your typical three-bedroom, two-bath home in Homewood or Forest Park.
The value is appealing, but apparently not appealing enough.
Alabama has lost more historical buildings than its neighboring states. The isolation of the Black Belt has left some of these behemoths to languish empty. But with more government resources focused on this struggling region, there is hope, historians say.
Alabama has more bargain heritage homes because the agricultural region that produced them is so economically depressed, said Robert Gamble, senior architecture historian at the Alabama Historical Commission.
In travels to other states, he's found antebellum homes in much better shape - and more expensive.
"To be perfectly frank, I think the sociological situation is stronger in some of these other states than in Alabama," Gamble said. "We're still haunted by the ghosts of racism and economic inequities that perhaps are not as severe even in some of our other Southern states."
Atlanta's prosperity, for example, has spawned bedroom communities such as Eatonton and Sparta where historic homes are better preserved and maintained, and can sell for a million bucks.
Not in Greensboro or Eutaw, where Victorian treasures rarely bring more than $100,000.
Selma's Old Town district has several streets of historic homes. None are on the market for more than $200,000.
Take Edie Jones' two-story Victorian on Church Street. On the market for $180,000, the six-bedroom home is immaculately restored.
Gingerbread trim is outside. Arched doorways fill the interior. And there's a Scarlett O'Hara stairway, perfect for charging up in a fit of anger.
Jones has tried to sell her home before, because she and her husband own another home outside town. But she's had a hard time saying goodbye.
"This house will just not let me go," Jones said. She's gone from room to room, lecturing the home. "I told each room, `You've got to let me go.'"
Birth to death in 20 feet:
Nearby in Old Town Selma, the late Page Melvin's five-bedroom federalist home is for sale for $90,000.
The beloved spinster was born here and died in the solid two-story white home earlier this year.
"Page was born in the dining room in 1902 and died almost 102 years later about 20 feet away in the front bedroom," said AC Reeves, the Realtor listing the home.
Melvin and her sister, Gertrude, lived in the house together many years, eating formal meals every day with silver, fine china and linen, Reeves said.
You can tell women lived here. The five bathrooms are glorious, with intricate tile work in a rainbow of colors. One bathroom has two sinks, a regular one plus a dinky auxiliary sink for toothbrushing, perhaps the predecessor of today's his-and-her vanities.
The first floor has more rooms than most people would know what to do with. A screened-in sleeping porch was used before air-conditioning, and there's a sun room and an entrance parlor with distinctive egg-and-dart molding, eggs being a fertility symbol.
"Didn't work for Page," Reeves said on a recent tour of the home.
"Thank goodness it didn't work for Page ... that would have been a big scandal," said Mary Ann Patterson, another Realtor at Heritage who specializes in Selma's historic buildings and seems to know the juicy stories behind most of them.
A feature of nearly all of these homes, heart-pine floors, is nearly extinct in modern buildings. Heart pine is so valuable that some builders pick apart old homes to extract it. The South's giant pines were demolished decades ago, and it will be a long time before there are more that produce these broad, reddish beams.
No Starbucks? Who cares?:
For most city dwellers, these are fantasy houses - for that life you're going to have when you drop out of the rat race and open a cozy bed and breakfast, maybe learn to knit. Or for a weekend retreat where you'll bake muffins and take long baths in a clawfoot tub. Or for the days when you have enough books to need floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves or a library.
There's no nearby Starbucks, not many choices at the movie theater. But with light-filled rooms like these, you might not care.
Cecil Gayle and Kenneth Parker enjoyed the big-city life in Atlanta. Now they live in an 8,000-square-foot, 1913 home in Sardis, south of Selma. The polite Southern gentlemen declined to give the exact price of the home. "It was extremely reasonable," Gayle said, "certainly under $100,000."
The home, which sits behind colorful maples on Alabama 41, belonged to Gayle's aunt, the third wife of the builder, J. Bruce Hain.
Because it was in his family, Gayle likely got a discount. Yet no one else in the family was willing to take it on, and the home sat vacant for 23 years. The couple bought it in 1998, after leasing it and staying here off and on while Gayle tended to sick parents.
A comparable home would have cost more than $1 million anywhere near Atlanta, where they lived previously.
They replaced two of the four massive white outside columns. The originals are cypress logs, brought up the Alabama River by barge.
All of the rooms are 18 by 21 feet, with fireplaces and 12-foot ceilings. Need a place to eat? There's a formal dining room, a big red breakfast room and a cafe table on an enclosed porch.
The couple use the walk-in pantry for their china collection - four sets, including a 172-piece estate sale find of Old Paris china.
"There's no way to duplicate the charm and the space you find in an old house like this," Gayle said.
Adjustment to rural life has been fairly easy, the men say.
Instead of a drink in the city, they enjoy an evening cocktail on the wide second-story balcony. Instead of the symphony, they attend shows at Selma's performing arts center.
The retirees, 67 and 74, say they'll stay.
"I think it was a very good bargain. But I know there are other houses that are just as good a bargain as this one. They're out there," Gayle said.
Choose your staircase:
At opposite ends of the Black Belt bargain spectrum sit Kenworthy Hall and the Harmony Club.
Kenworthy Hall, one of 2,500 places nationally to be named a National Historic Landmark, sold in August with 20 acres for $335,000.
The 11,000-square-foot home has a 5,000-square-foot attic, a wine cellar, a tower on the fourth floor and three staircases - a grand stair, a family stair and a servant stair that is comparable to modern homes' single staircases.
"In Birmingham, in Mountain Brook or Highland, this house brings easily $1.5 million," said owner Loyd Anderson, a Birmingham investigator and former Shelby County sheriff's deputy. "With this much land, it wouldn't exist."
Anderson lives half the week in the mansion outside Marion and half in Birmingham. He plans to open the home for weddings and parties when he finishes restoring it, which will not be long.
He bought the house in excellent condition. His assistant, Blake Barnes, is repainting the dingy white walls in pastels.
Truly antebellum, the home was built from 1858 to 1860. Like most historic homes in the region, it has a kitchen separate from the main part, to prevent fire.
A few signs of neglect and vandalism remain - chips in the marble mantels, scarred floors. A lumber company owned it in the 1950s. It sat vacant, and vandals found it.
Marion Realtor Kay Beckett, who listed Kenworthy Hall and specializes in historic Black Belt homes, said it's the sometimes more unfortunate aspects of the region that have created such a fertile place for historic homes.
"Poverty preserved," Beckett said. "If you don't have the money to change things, things will stay the same ... you still have that clawfoot tub sitting there. In other more affluent areas, people changed this stuff years ago."
'The grandest pigeon roost':
Call it Tara 2004.
David Hurlbut restored lofts in Atlanta, then decided he wanted his own unusual habitat.
"I'd been looking for a castle for a good five years," said Hurlbut, a bearded, ponytailed admitted eccentric with a raucous laugh.
What he found was a three-story, 20,000-square-foot downtown Selma building that formerly housed the city's Jewish social club, the Harmony Club.
It sits on Water Street with a view of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The pricetag? Less than $75,000 is as specific as he gets. Hurlbut said he's priced the materials to build something like this from scratch at $7 million.
His home has a stage and ballroom, where he roller-skates.
The structure looks like a vampire might be at home here, or bats. It is at once drafty, dusty, eerie and fabulous.
"When I bought the building, it was horrible." Hurlburt says.
"It was hazardous," says Patterson, the Realtor.
The building had been sealed up for 40 years. "It was the grandest pigeon roost around," Hurlbut said.
During his initial excavation, he carried 140 cubic yards of pigeon excrement to the trash.
The third-floor windows still had no glass. Yet there's a living room and bar up there.
When Hurlbut's mother first visited his home, her response was, "Why are you doing this to me?" he says with a huge laugh.
His decor is Victorian lamps, movie posters, mounted heads of slain beasts, velvet couches, massive paintings and cobwebs. The bathroom contains two toilets and a urinal, all from its day as a social club. In the kitchen, there are absinthe bottles, full and empty, as well as an espresso maker.
Hurlbut pushes Selma as a great place for art and culture, besides the thrifty housing.
"Selma's three hours to Atlanta, three hours to the beach, four hours and 20 minutes to New Orleans," he said. "It's just hip."
Tara for a song
Black Belt filled with historic mansions at bargain prices
Sunday, December 12, 2004
CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer
UNIONTOWN - For less money than some mid-sized SUVs, a mansion can be yours.
The rooms are gigantic, the parlors formal, the white columns imposing. The price tag: a nonimposing $44,000.
The catch? Well, it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of catfish farms and poor people and other decaying mansions. This particular aging beauty - Uniontown's Co-Nita Manor, was built in 1906 for the town's doctor. It could use lots of paint and TLC, but it's easy to imagine the home at its peak, when windows were taller than NBA centers and floors were gleaming hardwood. One balconied room once held two billiard tables - with room to spare.
Throughout Alabama's Black Belt are scores of these bargain treasures, homes in their prime 80 to 150 years ago. Some have been restored; others cry out for a handyman.
Almost all have high ceilings, built-in bookcases, heart-pine floors, porches galore and massive pocket doors.
None, not even an 11,000-square-foot Italianate landmark, cost as much as your typical three-bedroom, two-bath home in Homewood or Forest Park.
The value is appealing, but apparently not appealing enough.
Alabama has lost more historical buildings than its neighboring states. The isolation of the Black Belt has left some of these behemoths to languish empty. But with more government resources focused on this struggling region, there is hope, historians say.
Alabama has more bargain heritage homes because the agricultural region that produced them is so economically depressed, said Robert Gamble, senior architecture historian at the Alabama Historical Commission.
In travels to other states, he's found antebellum homes in much better shape - and more expensive.
"To be perfectly frank, I think the sociological situation is stronger in some of these other states than in Alabama," Gamble said. "We're still haunted by the ghosts of racism and economic inequities that perhaps are not as severe even in some of our other Southern states."
Atlanta's prosperity, for example, has spawned bedroom communities such as Eatonton and Sparta where historic homes are better preserved and maintained, and can sell for a million bucks.
Not in Greensboro or Eutaw, where Victorian treasures rarely bring more than $100,000.
Selma's Old Town district has several streets of historic homes. None are on the market for more than $200,000.
Take Edie Jones' two-story Victorian on Church Street. On the market for $180,000, the six-bedroom home is immaculately restored.
Gingerbread trim is outside. Arched doorways fill the interior. And there's a Scarlett O'Hara stairway, perfect for charging up in a fit of anger.
Jones has tried to sell her home before, because she and her husband own another home outside town. But she's had a hard time saying goodbye.
"This house will just not let me go," Jones said. She's gone from room to room, lecturing the home. "I told each room, `You've got to let me go.'"
Birth to death in 20 feet:
Nearby in Old Town Selma, the late Page Melvin's five-bedroom federalist home is for sale for $90,000.
The beloved spinster was born here and died in the solid two-story white home earlier this year.
"Page was born in the dining room in 1902 and died almost 102 years later about 20 feet away in the front bedroom," said AC Reeves, the Realtor listing the home.
Melvin and her sister, Gertrude, lived in the house together many years, eating formal meals every day with silver, fine china and linen, Reeves said.
You can tell women lived here. The five bathrooms are glorious, with intricate tile work in a rainbow of colors. One bathroom has two sinks, a regular one plus a dinky auxiliary sink for toothbrushing, perhaps the predecessor of today's his-and-her vanities.
The first floor has more rooms than most people would know what to do with. A screened-in sleeping porch was used before air-conditioning, and there's a sun room and an entrance parlor with distinctive egg-and-dart molding, eggs being a fertility symbol.
"Didn't work for Page," Reeves said on a recent tour of the home.
"Thank goodness it didn't work for Page ... that would have been a big scandal," said Mary Ann Patterson, another Realtor at Heritage who specializes in Selma's historic buildings and seems to know the juicy stories behind most of them.
A feature of nearly all of these homes, heart-pine floors, is nearly extinct in modern buildings. Heart pine is so valuable that some builders pick apart old homes to extract it. The South's giant pines were demolished decades ago, and it will be a long time before there are more that produce these broad, reddish beams.
No Starbucks? Who cares?:
For most city dwellers, these are fantasy houses - for that life you're going to have when you drop out of the rat race and open a cozy bed and breakfast, maybe learn to knit. Or for a weekend retreat where you'll bake muffins and take long baths in a clawfoot tub. Or for the days when you have enough books to need floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves or a library.
There's no nearby Starbucks, not many choices at the movie theater. But with light-filled rooms like these, you might not care.
Cecil Gayle and Kenneth Parker enjoyed the big-city life in Atlanta. Now they live in an 8,000-square-foot, 1913 home in Sardis, south of Selma. The polite Southern gentlemen declined to give the exact price of the home. "It was extremely reasonable," Gayle said, "certainly under $100,000."
The home, which sits behind colorful maples on Alabama 41, belonged to Gayle's aunt, the third wife of the builder, J. Bruce Hain.
Because it was in his family, Gayle likely got a discount. Yet no one else in the family was willing to take it on, and the home sat vacant for 23 years. The couple bought it in 1998, after leasing it and staying here off and on while Gayle tended to sick parents.
A comparable home would have cost more than $1 million anywhere near Atlanta, where they lived previously.
They replaced two of the four massive white outside columns. The originals are cypress logs, brought up the Alabama River by barge.
All of the rooms are 18 by 21 feet, with fireplaces and 12-foot ceilings. Need a place to eat? There's a formal dining room, a big red breakfast room and a cafe table on an enclosed porch.
The couple use the walk-in pantry for their china collection - four sets, including a 172-piece estate sale find of Old Paris china.
"There's no way to duplicate the charm and the space you find in an old house like this," Gayle said.
Adjustment to rural life has been fairly easy, the men say.
Instead of a drink in the city, they enjoy an evening cocktail on the wide second-story balcony. Instead of the symphony, they attend shows at Selma's performing arts center.
The retirees, 67 and 74, say they'll stay.
"I think it was a very good bargain. But I know there are other houses that are just as good a bargain as this one. They're out there," Gayle said.
Choose your staircase:
At opposite ends of the Black Belt bargain spectrum sit Kenworthy Hall and the Harmony Club.
Kenworthy Hall, one of 2,500 places nationally to be named a National Historic Landmark, sold in August with 20 acres for $335,000.
The 11,000-square-foot home has a 5,000-square-foot attic, a wine cellar, a tower on the fourth floor and three staircases - a grand stair, a family stair and a servant stair that is comparable to modern homes' single staircases.
"In Birmingham, in Mountain Brook or Highland, this house brings easily $1.5 million," said owner Loyd Anderson, a Birmingham investigator and former Shelby County sheriff's deputy. "With this much land, it wouldn't exist."
Anderson lives half the week in the mansion outside Marion and half in Birmingham. He plans to open the home for weddings and parties when he finishes restoring it, which will not be long.
He bought the house in excellent condition. His assistant, Blake Barnes, is repainting the dingy white walls in pastels.
Truly antebellum, the home was built from 1858 to 1860. Like most historic homes in the region, it has a kitchen separate from the main part, to prevent fire.
A few signs of neglect and vandalism remain - chips in the marble mantels, scarred floors. A lumber company owned it in the 1950s. It sat vacant, and vandals found it.
Marion Realtor Kay Beckett, who listed Kenworthy Hall and specializes in historic Black Belt homes, said it's the sometimes more unfortunate aspects of the region that have created such a fertile place for historic homes.
"Poverty preserved," Beckett said. "If you don't have the money to change things, things will stay the same ... you still have that clawfoot tub sitting there. In other more affluent areas, people changed this stuff years ago."
'The grandest pigeon roost':
Call it Tara 2004.
David Hurlbut restored lofts in Atlanta, then decided he wanted his own unusual habitat.
"I'd been looking for a castle for a good five years," said Hurlbut, a bearded, ponytailed admitted eccentric with a raucous laugh.
What he found was a three-story, 20,000-square-foot downtown Selma building that formerly housed the city's Jewish social club, the Harmony Club.
It sits on Water Street with a view of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The pricetag? Less than $75,000 is as specific as he gets. Hurlbut said he's priced the materials to build something like this from scratch at $7 million.
His home has a stage and ballroom, where he roller-skates.
The structure looks like a vampire might be at home here, or bats. It is at once drafty, dusty, eerie and fabulous.
"When I bought the building, it was horrible." Hurlburt says.
"It was hazardous," says Patterson, the Realtor.
The building had been sealed up for 40 years. "It was the grandest pigeon roost around," Hurlbut said.
During his initial excavation, he carried 140 cubic yards of pigeon excrement to the trash.
The third-floor windows still had no glass. Yet there's a living room and bar up there.
When Hurlbut's mother first visited his home, her response was, "Why are you doing this to me?" he says with a huge laugh.
His decor is Victorian lamps, movie posters, mounted heads of slain beasts, velvet couches, massive paintings and cobwebs. The bathroom contains two toilets and a urinal, all from its day as a social club. In the kitchen, there are absinthe bottles, full and empty, as well as an espresso maker.
Hurlbut pushes Selma as a great place for art and culture, besides the thrifty housing.
"Selma's three hours to Atlanta, three hours to the beach, four hours and 20 minutes to New Orleans," he said. "It's just hip."
12/14/04, 06:35 AM
#12
After all these years,
My C/T still sucks!
My C/T still sucks!
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Originally posted by mav@December 14, 2004, 8:23 AM
IMO Those houses are ugly, old and run down.
IMO Those houses are ugly, old and run down.
Houses pretty. Location ugly.Plus its 3 minutes from everything.
12/14/04, 01:21 PM
#14
After all these years,
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Originally posted by incorrigible@December 14, 2004, 10:57 AM
Do those prices include Ghosts and Spirits and things?
Do those prices include Ghosts and Spirits and things?
I never been so creeped out in my life as down there at night.
12/14/04, 09:26 PM
#16
Personally, I think our governor's mansion looks a little like the Addams Family house. Just in better condition.
Well, maybe not as much, other than architectual style. :scratch:
Well, maybe not as much, other than architectual style. :scratch:
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