Morris Avenue Birmingham — Morris Avenue by the Alabama Peanut Company. (Pat Byington / Bham Now)

Traces of Birmingham’s past are everywhere you look, including the streets we walk down each day.

Head on down to the corner of Morris Avenue and 20th Street North, and there is a historical marker that recognizes where the Elyton Land Company founded The Magic City, which reads:

“Morris Avenue was named for one of the founders of Birmingham, Josiah Morris, who paid $100,000 for 4,157 acres of the original site of the city in 1870. At the suggestion of Mr. Morris, the city was named for England’s industrial district. This avenue was the principal wholesale trade district of the city and enjoyed its greatest popularity from 1880 to 1900. Some of the city’s most prominent families owned business firms here…

Birmingham was founded in 1871 by the Elyton Land Company whose offices were located on Morris Avenue and Twentieth Street…”

About those cobblestones… or not

Bob Moody’s 1970s rendering of Morris Avenue with the new cobblestones. (Bob Moody)

As a resident of Birmingham for over 36 years, I believe there is nothing more picturesque in the city than Morris Avenue during “golden hour” at sunset.

There are great backdrops up and down the street like the Alabama Peanut Company, the multi-colored murals, Founder’s Station, viaducts and the little red caboose, the home to Kinetic Communications.

I’m also a little ashamed to admit that I always assumed Morris’s cobblestones between 20th Street and 23rd Street have been there since Birmingham was established in the late 1800s.

Boy, was I wrong.

After a little research, I discovered the current cobblestones were installed in the mid-1970s. In fact, the Birmingham City Council passed the measure almost 50 years ago back on Oct. 1, 1975.

According to Bob Moody, a prominent graphic designer at the time who actually did renderings of a new reimagined Morris Avenue, the goal back then was to transform the avenue into “Birmingham’s version of Underground Atlanta.”

He also told me another bombshell detail: The “cobblestones” on Morris Avenue that were installed in the 70s are not “real” cobblestones like the ones that use ancient river rocks.

Morris Avenue’s “cobblestones” are Belgian blocks, which are larger and rectangular, commonly used as ballast in tall ships and later repurposed for paving in seaport cities.

Here is the cool part for landlocked Birmingham: Moody recalls that our blocks came from Savannah, Georgia.