harry_house

"The House that Harry Built"
This excerpt was taken from
"Bottom of the Ninth: An Oral History on the Life
of Harry 'the Hat' Walker" by Larry Powell

Our house is quite a story all by itself. It's made of hand-hewn stone, cut from the mountains near Leeds. I still have the hammer and chisel that the stone mason used to cut the rock. He had those special-made by a blacksmith.

Every stone was cut using that hammer and chisel. None were cut with a saw or anything like that. It was a slow process. It took the mason all day to cover a 12-foot wall.

The workers cut the stone out of the mountain and brought them to a site in big blocks. Those blocks were then split and shaped using a ruler. Each piece was cut by hand to fit the place that they needed. They used charcoal to draw the design that they needed to cut, once they figured out what shape they needed.

The stone couldn't have any cracks in it. If it did, it would split the wrong way. They had to get pieces that they could cut like you used to split ice.

They would mark it with the charcoal, place a chisel on the mark, and hit the chisel with a sledge hammer. Then they would come back in and put two little wedges into the cracks made by the chisel, and they would place a big wedge between the two little ones.

When they hit that big wedge again, that stone would start popping lick ice, just pop open. They did every piece like that.






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The old man who built it had built a house for my brother in the early 1930s. That was during the Depression, and a lot of people were out of work. When word got out that Dixie was building a house, a number of people wanted to work on it.

This mason, John, was one of them. Dixie, Dad, and two or three bricklayers were there when he came up, barefooted, and asked for a job.

"We don't need anymore workers," somebody said. "We've got people standing around waiting to work."

He said, "Man, my family and I are hungry, and I don't have anything. I just need anything. I'll dig a ditch, I'll do anything." So Dixie gave him a pick and he went to work on the grounds.

When they had the site ready to start building, they ran into a problem. Dixie had planned to buy his brick from a man in Ensley. We had lived out in that area at one time, and Dixie had gone back there to buy brick. But, when he got there, the man had doubled his price on the brick.

Dixie said, "I won't do it. I'll build it out of wood, instead."

This guy was standing nearby. He heard all this, and he knew Dixie was upset

Finally, the old man said, "Why don't you build it out of stone?"

Dixie said, "John, why don't you just leave us alone. We've got enough to worry about."

"Mr. Walker," John said, "You can build this house out of stone, I guarantee it. I can build it."

Now here's a guy who is barefooted, dipping snuff, and doesn't look like he knows how to build a doghouse, and he's talking about building a house out of stone.

"If you'll get in your car and ride with me on top to Shades Mountain, I'll take you to some of the homes I've built," John said.

Dad was standing there too, and he said, "What have we got to lose? Let's go."

They drove up to the top of Shades Mountain, just south of Birmingham, and John took them up to a big stone house. Dad started to get nervous and said, "We're going to get run out of here."

But they god out of the car and John led them up to the door of the house. He knocked, a lady came up and opened the door, and said, "John, what are you doing up here?"

"I brought these men up here. They don't think I can build a house. I wanted them to see."

"Yes," she said, "He built mine, and he built the one down the street."

Dixie, Dad, and John got back in the car, went back home, and John built Dixie a house out of stone. That was in the early 1930s; mine was built in 1947.

They used the same process for both houses. They found this stone at a place between Leeds and Birmingham, somewhere on one of those ridges that's near what is now I-20. They cut it in blocks there, brought it here, and cut it into smaller pieces to use for building.

Most of the house was completed in '47. Two years later, I decided I wanted to add my "play room," a place where I could keep all my baseball mementos. So the old man back and added it.

Later on, I decided I wanted a 20-by-20 foot room on the back side of the house. He came back to do that, or rather his boys did. By then, the old man couldn't work anymore.

His two boys were really brick layers, not stone masons, but they had been involved in building the house, so they agreed to come back and add another room.

Or at least, most of it. They got tired of the job before they finished, and they left a hole up about four or five feet square on the back side.

They just quit one day. "There's no way I'll throw another stone up," one of them said, "I'm tired, and I ain't gonna do it." I had to get somebody else to finish that last section.

It was the last stone work those boys did. Even today, our house is one of the few in the area that was built from scratch, just chiseled our of the ground and then chiseled to fit each hole.

With the house finished, I was ready to get back to baseball …


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