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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Queenstown Lodge, as seen from across the lake.
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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Images from Birmingham News articles, published in the 1930s, and restored booths adorn the walls and living space of the lodge.
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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Images from Birmingham News articles, published in the 1930s, and restored booths adorn the walls and living space of the lodge.
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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
A color-restored photograph of Queenstown Lake from 1926 displayed at the lodge.
One of the first song titles you see in the dusty red jukebox at Queenstown Lodge is “Trade Winds,” a Bing Crosby song that paints a picture of “a new world where paradise starts.”
How fitting.
Many don’t know it, but Queenstown Lake in Trussville holds quite a history in and around its bass-filled waters. The lake was formed in the early 1900s when a nearby creek was dammed. The owner, B.O. Edwards, built 15 cabins and developed the lake property, including a boat house and dance hall, around 1910.
Around this time, Queenstown Lake became a destination resort. Fashionable people flocked to the lake from Birmingham for picnics, weekend getaways, swimming, fishing and boating.
Boy Scouts camped there. Collegiate football and baseball teams held training days there. The Naval Reserve held rowing drills at the lake. In 1930, Queenstown Lodge opened. In 1945, the property was scoured by State Highway Patrol bloodhounds for German prisoners of war. There were enough articles written in Alabama newspapers about the size of bass in the lake to fill up a livewell.
Articles from bygone days detail it all, but mostly there are advertisements for dances. Big bands came from across the South to play at Queenstown Lake. Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing,” played there. So did Artie Shaw and Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, among many others.
When prohibition laws were repealed, the tenor of Queenstown Lake changed. It became wilder, a roadside honky-tonk. Many folks would speed away on the curvy Queenstown Road, more than a little buzzed, and crash.
In 1967, the Gorrie family purchased the Queenstown Lake property. The lodge was boarded up and covered in kudzu vines. For three years, it was a family weekend renovation project, a time that reminded Miller Gorrie of the days when he and his father, M.J., built a nearby cabin. The lodge needed its windows replaced, and a good sandblasting to get rid of the thick coats of paint. However, the brickwork, wooden floors, original booths that lined the walls and jukebox remained.
“I was just a little girl then,” said Ellen Gorrie Walker, Miller Gorrie’s daughter. “I can remember some of the different houses and stuff that were on the property. Everything was in pretty much fallen-down shape.”
Nell Brasher, a longtime Queenstown-area resident who often wrote short columns about life there — and even a book about Queenstown — titled one of her 1969 columns, “For Each a New Road.” She wrote it as a love letter to the moon over the place she called home, about mockingbirds singing in the chinaberry trees and lightning bugs twinkling in the dark.
“Strange how life capsules us, each into his own now chapter of life so that it’s brand new, a frontier, no matter how many others have passed that every way ahead of us,” she wrote, in part.
In May 1970, as the Gorrie family was slashing down all that kudzu, Brasher wrote a column bluntly titled “Queenstown’s changing.” She wrote of the drinking, gambling, fighting, even the rumors of a murder from the lake property’s honky-tonk era. She wrote of cars coming and going at all hours on the weekends, of wild music, whooping and cursing. She detailed one night when she called the honky-tonk at 2 a.m., furious and unable to sleep. She told them that it was God and to quiet down, and she hung up. Folks left the establishment, fearing a raid, and she felt victorious. But an hour later, they returned.
“Yes, the face of Queenstown is changing — has been for a long time and for the better,” she ended the column.
Walker put together a book about Queenstown Lake and the adjoining Blackjack Farms, which the Gorrie family also owns. The book includes the two properties’ histories and her family’s milestones.
“When I was growing up, we would spend all our summers there and our weekends there,” Walker said. “It’s my favorite place. I love it.”
Queenstown Lake was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks & Heritage by the Alabama Historical Commission in 2011. The family has a small historical marker honoring the distinction.
“It is an excellent example of an early 20th century vacation resort in Jefferson County,” according to the AHC. “Queenstown Lake and Lodge survive as reminders of this early history.”
The three-bedroom lodge has been renovated again, Walker said. Over the past year, they added a bathroom, updated the kitchen and created a playroom. The jukebox is being restored.
“It’s more like a vacation [home],” Walker said. “We were out there just fishing and playing, hanging out. We spend all holidays there. It’s so close. We just come out on the weekends to hang out.”
Just like it used to be.
