Centennial Memorial Park: From city keepsakes to state memorial

Nov. 11—Despite the recent damage to Anniston's Centennial Memorial Park the Veteran's Day ceremony went on as scheduled at 11 a.m. Friday.

Last month a wayward driver in a vehicle destroyed the Korean War memorial wall and damaged the face of the WWI and WWII walls at the park. A separate brick wall that sat in front of the old Anniston High School columns at the park was also destroyed.

The Centennial Park Committee is in the process of replacing and repairing the memorial walls and the city of Anniston is rebuilding the stand-alone brick wall.

How the park came to be a fixture in the hearts of so many is a tale of preservation, patience and perseverance.

The Centennial in the park's name dates back to 1983 when Anniston celebrated its 100th anniversary of being a public municipality, having shed its old identity as a company town for Woodstock Iron Co.

In 1983 the Anniston City Council donated the commercially prized property at the northeast corner of 17th Street and Quintard — valued at $250,000 — for a memorial park.

Then-Mayor Gertrude Williams said, "That was Anniston's gift to Anniston, it's something that will be here 100 years from now."

Elements in the original plan for the park included the stone columns that once graced the entryway to the old Anniston High School building, a reflecting pool, seating, a trolley car, plaques and headquarters for the alumni association.

To help raise funds for the park the alumni association sold bricks from the old high school and sold square-foot plots to alumni for $30 each. An advertisement ran in The Anniston Star in December 1984 for small squares of the property for which a personalized deed would then be mailed to the lucky recipient.

"With your 'foot' in the park your heart is in Anniston," the advertisement announced. Just in time for Christmas.

The columns from the demolished Annniston High School were languishing in pieces under a rainproof tarp behind a city garage mixed in with drainage pipes, bricks and street signs when a group of determined Anniston High School alumni found out they still existed. It was 1984 and the former students were determined to save the stonework that represented their memories of the school where they had spent their formative years. The alumni group had been working for more than a year to organize plans for the park and members figured the rebuilt columns would serve as the focal point.

A viable Anniston High alumni association marched forward with the idea of the park and created a computerized list to coordinate class reunions and help with future park-related activities.

The official kickoff for the park was on June 30, 1984, complete with the U.S. Army band, food and festivities.

Anniston native and AHS alumna Pat Potter was quoted in The Star with a prophetic choice of words: "This park is something with real potential that people will appreciate for years to come."

By 1986 the effort to publicly display the old columns was still ongoing. The Anniston High School Memorial Committee had been organized to raise funds for the park and to move the iconic columns that Mayor Williams had purchased for $300.

Organizers also wanted the park to contain an old Anniston trolley car, representing a mode of transportation that had ceased in the Model City in 1932. The trolley was bought by AHS graduate DeWitt McCargo and was restored by the Monsanto Corporation. The committee had raised $10,000 by April of that year and by early 1987 the coffers had increased to $20,000.

By March 1987 work finally began as workers from McWhorter Corporation started laying the foundation for the park. The estimated cost of the project was $75,000 and the late Julian Jenkins was the architect for the project.

Robert E. Box, chairman of the park committee, said that due to lack of funding the development of the park would have to be done in phases.

By 1988 some thought that the park would have to be renamed Anniston Bicentennial Park due to the lack of progress.

"It has been a slow, slow project," said Gene Cornett, who was the Anniston Parks and Recreation director at the time.

"When it's all up there and landscaped, it will be worth it, I just hope I live long enough to see it," Cornett said.

The columns from the high school — that were in pieces — were finally put in place with some difficulty as limestone had to be added to fill in the gaps.

Phase one of the park was completed in 1990 and the park sprang to life hosting a variety of events including a campaign stop by "Alabama's next Governor" Paul Hubbert in June.

But the park was still not finished prompting an editorial comment from The Anniston Star.

"Anniston's Centennial Park still suffers from an unfinished look long after the town's 100th birthday."

Enter Ken Rollins

"I got involved in July of 1990, it was a flat piece of property," Ken Rollins said, who was the state president of the Vietnam Veterans of America at the time.

"Gertrude Williams got those columns moved over there from the old schoolhouse from Anniston High where she went to school," Williams said.

Rollins said the city gave him permission to construct the state Vietnam Veterans wall at the park.

"The next step was to raise money to build the memorial and I had to get $60,000 to do that, and that brought into play a fellow by the name of Eli Henderson," Rollins said.

"I couldn't get the money, nobody wanted to donate any money for a Vietnam Memorial. Eli got the money for me through the county commission, so we built the Vietnam memorial first, the state Vietnam memorial," Rollins said.

Then Rollins and Henderson decided to build the WWI and WWII walls but had to somehow build a wall to block off the distractions from Quintard Avenue.

"It was so noisy," he said.

Rollins said that berms were needed but that idea was "knocked down" by the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) restrictions.

"You couldn't build anything south of 18th Street that was abrupt, that didn't meet the standards for the planning commission and all that, I got knocked down on that," Rollins said.

"I went back and got with a fellow named Jan Scruggs, we were in Montgomery and he's the one who designed the wall in Washington, D.C. the Vietnam wall up there," Rollins said.

Rollins said that Scruggs had a similar problem with designing the Vietnam wall in Washington as nothing "abrupt" could be built.

"To see the wall you have to walk down into a lower level, that didn't cause an abrupt thing in the park," Rollins said.

Rollins said he used the same idea in designing the berms for the park in Anniston.

"You'll notice they don't stand straight up, they're sloped and when I went before the city to make my proposal they said I kind of tricked them by not making straight up berms but making sloped berms therefore it didn't violate the CDBG," he said.

"We got past that hoop and through Eli, the city of Anniston and the Calhoun County commission we got the money to build WWI, WWII," Rollins said.

Rollins said that Oxford police Chief Bill Partridge designed a law enforcement tag and portion of the revenue from that tag went to the Centennial Memorial Committee that consisted of himself, Henderson, Partridge, Kim McCarson and "a couple of others."

"So we picked up money to build a law enforcement memorial, the firefighters memorial, Iraq and Afghanistan memorial, so that's how it came to be, no organization helped, we didn't have any organization donating money or anything like that, no GoFundMe or anything it was all city, county and that's about it," Rollins said.

The four official ceremonies held at the park each year are Veterans Day, Memorial Day, the Law Enforcement Memorial Ceremony and the 911 Ceremony.

Bill Partridge

"We had no official state law enforcement memorial in the state of Alabama, so I really felt like it was very important for us to develop and create a state law enforcement memorial, to honor those men and women who have given their lives over the years in the state of Alabama serving their communities," Partridge said.

"So we sat down and figured out how we were going to fund it, that was really the hardest part figuring out how we were going to pay for it, because we knew it was going to be expensive," he said.

"We came up with the idea of having a State Law Enforcement memorial tag, and we got that developed," Partridge said.

Partridge said that the local delegation including State representatives Randy Wood and Steve Hurst were very instrumental in getting the measure passed through the legislature for the vehicle tag.

"At the time Governor Bentley also signed an act into law that created the official Alabama Law Enforcement Memorial to be dedicated at Centennial Park there in Anniston," Partridge said.

"We started talking about in the early 2000's, really ramped up the idea of it probably around 2010, and then we started working behind the scenes to try to get some things put together, and by the time we got everything up and through the Legislature it was around 2014," he said.

The tag came out officially in 2015 and enough funds came in to complete the law enforcement memorial.

"Of course we have continual maintenance and of course unfortunately we have to add names to it every year, something I don't look forward to every spring," Partridge said.

The first law enforcement ceremony was held in 2015, he said.

Partridge bleeds blue when he speaks of the officers that have fallen in the line of duty and he, along with the Centennial Memorial committee, wants to make sure they are never forgotten.

"We should never forget the people who have sacrificed their lives either for their communities here locally or across the state, or in the United States as you see with the WWI, the WWII, the Vietnam, the Korean memorial, and plus the new Iraq and Afghanistan memorial walls and the firefighter's memorial wall," he said.

"If we don't remember those individuals we're going to be lost as a nation in our future, we can't forget those men and women who have paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country whether it be locally for the communities or for the nation," Partridge said.

Partridge said it's extremely important that the fallen officers are honored each year.

"It gives an opportunity for the family to be able to come and reflect and know that their loved one is never going to be forgotten," he said.

Partridge said new names of fallen officers will be sandblasted into the stone memorial

"We've done some research and we found some names from years past, many years past, early 1900s to mid 1900s that need to be on the wall that haven't been on the wall because either they were forgotten, or they slipped through the cracks back in the '20s, '30s, '40s, and '50s and we'll be adding some names to the memorial from then," Partridge said.

"Unfortunately we'll be adding names of officers who were killed in the line of duty in 2021," Partridge said.

Partridge said that before any of the ceremonies are held at the park the committee cleans the walls.

"You go up there and you're cleaning those walls and see those names and wonder, you know, what in the course of history had these people actually lived what they would have been able to accomplish, whether it be with medical advancements or anything, engineering, what could these people have accomplished that's not accomplished now," he said.

"They sacrificed their life for their state, their county, their cities or their country," he said.