Progress Marches On

When I was in high school, this was the bustling (relatively speaking) center of Madison, Alabama, which had remained pretty much unchanged since the 1950s. There was a dress shop, and a hardware store, and the old train station; and let's see, there was a little shoebox-sized post office, and City Hall was down there, and the town's fleet of two police cars - or was there just one? This photo was taken looking down Church Street, which contains the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, and one or two others.

When we moved to town, our next-door neighbor came to welcome us with a covered dish. "What church do y'all belong to?" she asked. Mom (that rascal!) told her we were Reformed Jews, which silenced our neighbor for a moment.

"Is that a Christian religion?"

Main Street runs along the railroad track, which is the reason there's a town in the first place. But Madison is now largely anchored along I-565, Huntsville's Loop. There are IHOPs and insurance agencies and Olive Gardens and pool halls and Home Depots and nail salons and Starbucks and apartment complexes and Best Buys and - wait for it, wait for it - a big-ass Wal-Mart!

My old house is about half a mile from downtown, on the old two-lane highway that crosses Main Street and spreads a line of houses out towards the cotton fields. That was my bedroom upstairs on the right.

And right across the street from it is Madison Middle School, which began life as Madison High School in the early 30s, and today huddles in the middle of a cluster of ugly, architecturally uninteresting red-brick buildings and a sign identifying it as Madison Elementary.

There's an old cemetery another half-mile or so from my old house. The newer gravestones here date from the 1930s; the oldest, from the 1870s. Walking among them, I recognize the surnames of a few of the kids I went to high school with.

Right across the street from it is a solitary cottonfield. Most of the open space around town looked like this when I lived there.

Today the cottonfields and open spaces are all gone, replaced by housing tracts and strip malls. My high school has moved about a mile down Hughes Road (I went to school with a Hughes) into an actual, large building with actual walls on the inside (or so I assume). The site of the great big warehouse-shell-on-a-slab that served us as a campus is now part of one of the endless subdivisions. No more Mr. B's, no more Madison Books, no more Barbara's Dress Shoppe.

Of course, it was never my town. My stepfather came in with the burgeoning Huntsville high-tech industry, and moved away six years later, when a better-paying job offered across the country. We belonged to the first wave of the suburbanites who did all this.

I'm glad I went, but I don't want to go back again.