How One Man Built Alabama's Grandest Suburb and a Crash Froze It Forever: Mountain Brook

Every other story about a place like this is a story about ruin. This one is different. This is the story of a place that was saved by a disaster. In March of 1929, a developer named Robert Jemison and one of the great landscape architects in America finished the plan for the most ambitious rich suburb the South had ever attempted, four thousand acres of it, a whole planned kingdom in the woods over the mountain from Birmingham. A replica of Mount Vernon. A golf course by the most famous designer alive. Model estates, bridle trails, an old stone mill built to look centuries old. Seven months later, the stock market crashed, and everything stopped. Everywhere else in America, 1929 is the year the dream died. In this one valley over one mountain in Alabama, it is the reason the place is still beautiful today. Because of exactly what had and had not been built when the money ran out, the crash did not ruin Mountain Brook. It froze it. This is the story of the wealthiest town in Alabama, the man who dreamed it, and how a catastrophe preserved it instead of destroying it. CHAPTERS (added after upload) Subscribe for more lost history like this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-9o1jfKyaASz4am9yTtxNA More Alabama stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4UGAVyqmTg&list=PLKZr9z2MwI-8&pp=0gcJCbwFa94AFGB0sAgC Mountain Brook Alabama, Robert Jemison, Warren Manning, Mountain Brook Estates, the Old Mill, 1929 crash, Birmingham suburbs, Tiny Kingdom, planned garden suburb, wealthiest town in Alabama.