Trussville museum offers deep look into city’s past

It is 9:44 a.m. on Saturday, April 2, and the Trussville Historical Museum at Heritage Hall is scheduled to be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Except the door is already unlocked, documents are spread across folding tables, and three members of the Trussville Historical Board — one of which brought a pan of muffins — are ready to talk. Only a few folks pass through for the first couple hours, which would be discouraging if there were not so many interesting artifacts to view.

On a mobile reversible cork board, the early stages of Trussville’s development are documented. There is information on the Cahaba Project, deeds and the minutes from the first six months of the Trussville City Council’s existence.

Through an old door is truly a step into the past. Hours could be spent in here learning, reminiscing. There are documents of the Truss family, from whom Trussville gets its name. There is a clear photo of a 1904 baptismal service in Pinchgut Creek, and most of those pictured are identified. There is a written paper, pieced together from old interviews, about Queenstown Lake being a 15-cabin resort at the turn of the 20th century.

There is a photo of the first graduating class in Trussville, taken in 1928. People can look at the raffle tickets for a 1946 Dodge car that were sold to purchase the town’s first fire truck. There is a brick from the blast furnace constructed in the late 1800s and another from the now-demolished football stadium built in 1949. A banner near the back of the museum shows that Hewitt High School sported the black and gold, not red and gray, for the first 16 years of its existence.

A large wooden sign, one of three of its kind made, hangs in the middle of the room, a focal point. “Welcome to Trussville,” it reads. A game of Trussvilleopoly, created in 2007, sits on a side table. There are enough yearbooks and photo albums to essentially verify that you are a part of this museum if you ever attended school here.

“Trussville was a different place,” said Trussville Historical Board member Jane Alexander. “It’s not the unique place it was back then, but there’s nothing wrong with it now. It’s just bigger. You knew everybody then. You hardly even know people now. It’s up to you to know people. You have to do something, be involved in something, work here. It’s different but it’s still a nice place to live. You don’t all go to school together. You don’t all go to church together. You don’t all play sports together. But a great many people did when it was smaller in numbers.”

Heritage Hall, where the museum is located, was originally constructed in 1938 as a retail general store and filling station managed by the Cahaba Cooperative Association. In 1951, four years after Trussville incorporated as a town, the town bought the general store to establish a community center and library. It later served as band and choral rooms for the high school. In 1988, on the building’s 50th anniversary, the Trussville Industrial Development Board restored the building. The building was dedicated to the preservation and development of the historic, civic and cultural heritage of the city through the Trussville Historical Board, the Trussville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Arts Council of the Trussville Area.

In recent months, the city of Trussville has made various repairs to Heritage Hall, including on the roof, to the heating and air system, and to the exterior. The Trussville City Council on March 8 authorized $19,000 toward the repainting and repairing of Heritage Hall and ACTA Theatre.

By the time the Heritage Hall door was locked April 2, not many people had come to see the museum’s artifacts. In four hours, maybe a dozen, including two Historical Board members’ husbands, stopped by. It is a tough task to pull people to the past when they are often pushing forward. But the city of Trussville and the Historical Board are trying.

“Trussville offers a lot,” Alexander said. “It offers a lot of activities for kids. And it did a long time ago. It’s just bigger now.”