WORDS Devin Yates PHOTOS and PAINTINGS David Braly
Oh, she’s got a story to tell. She’s aged but has seen such youth, she’s severe but gentile, and she is oh so hauntingly gorgeous. Meet Winter Place, an antique house with two distinct personalities. Imagine a journey from The Great Gatsby to Grey Gardens.
In the beginning, Winter Place was imagined by Colonel Joseph Samuel Prince Winter and his wife Mary Elizabeth Gindrat with the help of Philadelphia architect Samuel Sloan. At one time Winter Place housed Mr. and Mrs. Winter, their three children and all eleven grandchildren. The construction of the Winter Place residence on Goldthwaite Street began in 1858 but stalled due to the Civil War while parts of the Winter family relocated to Wales. Once the war was over construction was completed around 1871.
The main residence is comprised of two structures connected by an above ground passageway; the south house designed in a more ornate Second Empire style, while the north house is Italianate. The north house appears to be two stories tall, but upon further inspection clearly contains a basement. This basement is not the typical Southern basement, but rather an English basement. The perimeter of it has been dug out to resemble a moat, albeit an empty moat, to allow ample light into the bottom floor.
Winter Place’s north house was renovated into apartments in the mid-twentieth century. She held up-and-coming residents who would later become well known architects, attorneys, and revolutionaries. Winter Place remembers watching two bikini-clad German girls play badminton in the lawn while an Alabama Governor admired one so much that he later married her. A French teacher was giving lessons to F. Scott Fitzgerald in an upstairs room, and it is rumored that one day while descending the stairs he met his love, Zelda Sayre.
Winter Place was witness to such historical events as the Voting Rights March in 1965 when the Alabama National Guard stood on one side of the crowd and the Ku Klux Klan on the opposite while a bullet whizzed by her. She saw one of the first Montgomery AIDS Outreach meetings and listened in on ideas about starting Montgomery’s first independent movie theatre, now known as The Capri Theatre in Old Cloverdale. She grimaced as Interstates 85 and 65 were installed, wisely knowledgable that this would be the end to her glory days.
However, Winter Place was determined as she began aging gracefully, like a legendary, forgotten, and unloved denizen of Montgomery. The gatherings she held were the events of the year for that confident and lofty Montgomery crowd. A dear friend of a former inhabitant noted, “They were all Halloween parties in a way.” Indeed, the Halloween parties were especially notorious, with the eery coffin in the English basement which purportedly cradled a skeleton from the Civil War.
Winter Place became somewhat of a haunted legend when stories repeated of three children haunting inhabitants with sounds of their tiny footsteps and raucous laughter. Those stories told by the DJs of Montgomery’s African-American owned radio station, WPAX, dared the listeners to stay the night in the gloriously creepy Winter Place herself. The winners were awarded with some money, but certainly won many stories yet to be told.
We’ve only just scratched the surface of the mountain of history in one of Montgomery’s greatest, yet most under appreciated, historical treasures. Winter Place is wearing her Halloween mask right now, waiting to be dusted off and prettied up.
A special thank you to editor-in-chief of New South Books, Randall Williams; author of A Sense of Place, Jeffery C. Benton; artist and teacher David Braly, and co-founder of Haunted Montgomery Tours, Jeremy R. Cromblin.