Mockingbird on main

10/15/2026

10/14/2026

Come see us Friday and Saturday this week!

10/13/2026

We pass by almost weekly. Lovely ….
Worth a visit.

A BIBB COUNTY TOWN WAS LAID OUT BY A RAILROAD ENGINEER IN 1898, AND IT IS HOME TO A FAMILY POTTERY WHOSE ROOTS GO BACK TO THE 1800S.

The town is Brent, in central Alabama, surrounded on three sides by the Talladega National Forest. 🏺

Brent was the idea of Brent Armstrong, an engineer who had overseen building a railroad bridge over the Cahaba River. The town site was surveyed in April 1898 along a spur of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.

Armstrong developed the site with landowners Jesse Dean and Rhoda Cooper, and the streets were named for members of the Cooper family. Armstrong bought the first lot for $25 and became the first postmaster. He died in August 1899.

The town grew around a sawmill. It had its own railroad station by 1903, a bank by 1912, and it was incorporated in January 1913.

Brent has also known terrible days. On May 27, 1973, a tornado destroyed about 90 percent of the town's buildings and killed five people. Each May the town remembers with its Heroes and Patriots weekend.

Brent is also home to Miller's Pottery. The family's craft goes back to Abraham Miller, a Union veteran from Pennsylvania who learned pottery around 1870 near Mobile Bay and later moved to Perry County.

The craft passed down for generations. In 1964 Hendon Miller moved to Brent and opened a shop on Highway 5, choosing the spot for its natural gas line to fire his kiln.

The Encyclopedia of Alabama describes it as one of the few remaining traditional potteries in the United States. The family has continued to collect clay from the same Perry County site their ancestors used. 🌲

In a town built by a railroad man, one family has kept an older trade turning for generations.

10/09/2026

Open Saturday! Hurricane 🌀 candle sale. 20% off all Day!
Open 10-4.

10/07/2026

Yall!! What a great old picture of what is now Mockingbird on main ! So proud to be a part of saving history and a historic property!

LOOK AT THIS ALABAMA MAIN STREET IN 1941. ALMOST EVERYTHING ABOUT DAILY LIFE WAS HAPPENING RIGHT HERE.

This photograph was taken in Greensboro, Alabama, in 1941.
And I could stare at it for an hour.
Cars are lined along the curb.
Storefronts stretch down Main Street.

Signs advertise Coca-Cola and local businesses.
People are walking from one place to another.

Nobody in the photograph knew they were preserving a version of small-town Alabama that would eventually become almost unrecognizable.

Photographer Jack Delano took the picture while working for the federal Farm Security Administration.

Greensboro was already an old Alabama town by then. It had been incorporated in 1823 and served as the county seat of Hale County.

But forget the dates for a moment.
Look at the street.
This was before Walmart.

Before interstate exits lined with national chains.
Before Amazon boxes appeared on porches.
If you needed something, downtown was where you went.

The drugstore.
The grocery.
The hardware store.
The bank.
Maybe lunch somewhere along the way.

And because everybody was doing the same thing, downtown wasn't simply a shopping district.
It was where you ran into everybody.

Greensboro's historic downtown still contains an extraordinary collection of older buildings, with nearly 150 nineteenth-century structures in its historic district. City of Greensboro Alabama

But this photograph captures something buildings alone can't preserve.
It captures an ordinary Alabama day.

And sometimes ordinary days become the best history we have.

09/29/2026

Some of my favorite fall arrangements. I’m ready to play with flowers. Are you?