Valley Road resident wants to ‘raise the bar’ in area
By Gary Lloyd
TRUSSVILLE — Delvin Hunter Sr. curls his white Ford F-150 behind Mt. Joy Baptist Church on Valley Road, parking near the Suburban Area Community Center, where he attended the Head Start Program as a young boy in the mid 1970s.
His New Balance shoes and blue jean shorts are flecked with white paint stains, as are his fingertips. He wears a gray Lowe’s shirt and a yellow bandage on his left hand index finger.
Hunter works hard for a living, a CertainTeed roofing master who owns Hunter’s Development, LLC, which is a painting and general construction business. He’s been a painter for more than 20 years.
Mt. Joy Baptist Church Pastor Larry Hollman, left, and Delvin Hunter Sr. pose for a photo in front of the Suburban Area Community Center.
photo by Gary Lloyd
Hunter has called Valley Road home for about 40 years, a stretch of unincorporated Jefferson County sandwiched between the Trussville city limits and more of the Trussville city limits.
“I love the city (of Trussville),” Hunter says, noting that he went to school at Hewitt-Trussville in the 1980s.
His oldest of three kids went to Hewitt-Trussville High School until rezoning sent him to Shades Valley because of his Birmingham address, he says. Hunter says most of the 150 to 200 residents of the Valley Road and Forty Road area want to be in the city of Trussville.
“We’re being left alone, which is sometimes a good thing, but sometimes it’s not too good,” Hunter says.
He says crimes happen when people are left alone, when no one is paying attention.
“We’re trying to police our own neighborhood, we’re trying to do things to help the neighborhood so we can bring it up,” he says. “(We’ve) been doing it so long, just trying to raise the bar a little bit.”
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Jack Self says there were no calls to the unincorporated Jefferson County areas of Valley Road over the past year. Trussville City Clerk Lynn Porter says the city of Trussville has always taken the stance that it wouldn’t annex any property for which the property owner didn’t come to the city requesting annexation.
“This said, annexing in this manner created islands of property surrounded by the city that remained in the unincorporated Jefferson County,” Porter says. “In much of the Valley Road area, the landowners simply have not petitioned to come into the city. There have been a couple of occasions where the occupant had no paperwork to prove title to the property.”
Porter says about 10 to 15 homes off Forty Road are in Trussville.
A member of Mt. Joy Baptist Church at the peak of Valley Road for more than 20 years, Hunter says the men’s fellowship has painted houses, repaired homes and put up fences to “bring us up to standards,” to keep home values steady since nearby Trussville is “flourishing.” He says Mt. Joy Baptist Church Pastor Larry Hollman is “real active as far as trying to build up the confidence and just build up people in the community, raising people up in the community.”
Hunter says he and other men from the church, which has about 300 members, have gone around the area, asking people what can be done to help them out, whether it be repairing a roof, building a porch or something similar. He says these residents don’t know who to contact or call for help, so the men’s fellowship has been trying to help.
What’s needed, wanted?
The Valley Road residents and Mt. Joy Baptist Church members seem to have lofty goals. Hunter says they would like to have kids help clean up the area on Earth Day. They want to fix up the Suburban Area Community Center — which was built in 1953 — to host health screenings and a July Fourth fireworks show on the hill. They would like the grassy area behind the center to once again become a place of recreation for kids, since the swing set there is rusted and the basketball goal is broken.
Hunter says there are no funds to do this kind of work, but donations of money, time, suggestions or park plans would be incredible.
“We just need some people to step forward,” he says. “We’d like to look just as good as downtown Trussville up on the hill up here. Whatever God puts on someone’s heart to do, we’ll be more than willing to let them come in and do whatever they can do to help us.”
Hunter says Center Point and Woodlawn have parks, and areas with parks allow kids to flourish. That’s a proven fact, he says.
“We’re kind of the forgotten ones that are right here in Trussville,” he says.
Hunter says he’d like Valley Road and The Forties area residents to meet with Trussville city officials, to talk about all this.
“We’d just like Trussville, if they could, to reach out to us,” Hunter says. “We’re trying to reach out to them. We just want them to know we’re trying to reach out to them, and it’s not a few of us, it’s a bunch of us trying to reach out.”
Perception vs. reality
It’s obvious if you use Valley Road as a cut-through from Chalkville Mountain Road to downtown Trussville or vice versa that the area doesn’t appear to be well kept. Homes need paint and a lot of tender loving care, yards need to be re-sodded or sodded for the first time. It feels like a rundown area.
Hunter says, however, that there are good people who live in those homes, churchgoing people who work hard every day. He knows the perception is that everyone on Valley Road is “bad.”
“We’re trying to not have that image because there are some good people here,” he says. “We’re from Trussville. We have a standard that we try to uphold. We try to be some good people, some upstanding people.”
Hunter says he believes Valley Road in the Trussville limits can improve with a white bar painted just before the stop sign by the Shell gas station. He sees people rush through the stop sign all the time. He says he’s willing to do the work, if it means people will obey the traffic laws. He would also like to see a walking trail or sidewalk along Valley Road, because people walk it all the time and have to dodge passing cars. A sidewalk and more traffic lights would make it “more inviting,” he says.
“We just don’t want to be considered the bad people in Trussville or the bad apple in Trussville,” he says. “We want to be progressive. I just think we can be a better community if we come together and do some of these things.”
60 hidden graves
Hollman, Mt. Joy Baptist Church’s pastor for almost 22 years, is wearing a nice button-down shirt tucked into dress pants, complete with slick dress shoes. He looks as if he’s ready for a Sunday service. He is, however, walking through the woods, balancing himself by grabbing at low-hanging branches, carefully avoiding wet spots that could sink on a hot September afternoon.
The grave of Henry Talley
photo by Gary Lloyd
He’s in a heavily wooded area near Ashton Avenue and Bradford Circle, both Trussville streets. The wooded area in between them, however, is unincorporated Jefferson County. Between the tall, skinny trees and under the thick clumps of sticker bushes are headstones, some finely assembled with designs and words, others just blank, square-shaped rocks.
Hollman has counted about 60 graves here, the cemetery associated with Mt. Joy Baptist Church, a dominantly black church. It was a cemetery long before the Ashwood and Tutwiler Farm neighborhoods existed. Now, it sits between them.
“The cemetery is now surrounded by homes with no good access,” Porter says.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, two African-American brothers, William and Henry Talley, settled in Trussville and purchased land. In 1868, Henry Talley donated land to a church, and members constructed Mt. Joy Baptist Church. Henry Talley’s grave is in this cemetery.
“No one has requested that the cemetery be annexed,” Porter says. “The tax records only say ‘Cemetery’ and lists the site address for the mailing address, which is not a big deal since it is not taxable property, but we do not know who has the authority to annex the property.”
Hollman would like an access road constructed, so he and others can easily visit the cemetery, to observe its history.
Hunter says all these wants and needs have nothing to do with race or money. It’s about people wanting to help each other, he says.
“We love our brethren,” Hunter says. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”
Contact Gary Lloyd at news@trussvilletribune.com and follow him on Twitter @GaryALloyd.
