There from the start

Eugene, nicknamed “Bunny,” and Norma Sample have lived in Cahaba Heights for nearly 60 years, but it’s only been 16 years since they became Vestavia Hills residents. 

Norma Sample said she remembers voting for the annexation of Cahaba Heights into the city in the bottom floor of the New Merkel House senior center in 2002. 

Despite the change so late in their lives, Norma and Bunny Sample said when the New Merkel senior center opened its doors to include Vestavia Hills citizens after 2002, the Cahaba Heights patrons were excited to be able to share their stories with other people from the community.

“I tell you what, we’ve been through some times,” Norma Sample said.

She laughs when she remembers her first response after moving to the area with her husband in 1960. They had traveled to Grey’s, the closest shopping center off the edge of Cahaba Heights that included a Western Supermarket, a service station and small shoe shop.

“You call this a shopping center?” Norma Sample recalled saying. “I did not want to move there.” 

But it didn’t take long for her to warm up to the independent and fiercely loyal community, Norma Sample said. That was back when the area was “small and quaint,” New Merkel House manager Melanie Perry said, when everyone knew everyone and the 2-square-mile expanse of town was walkable. Norma Samples said when they first moved there, the town “was nothing but a kudzu patch and a little swampy area.”

The Cahaba Heights area was established as a community in the 1950s. When it was annexed into the city of Vestavia Hills, Cahaba Heights geographically connected the Liberty Park area — annexed into the city in 1992 — with the rest of Vestavia Hills to make it a 20-mile-long city. 

With the annexation, Vestavia Hills went from the fifth largest city in Jefferson County in 2000 to the third largest in 2010, after Hoover and Birmingham, according to state census numbers.

“Cahaba Heights was very important,” said Della Fancher, who was a proponent of the annexation and still owns the home in the Cahaba Heights area where her parents raised her. “For several years, Liberty Park sort of stood alone even though it was [part of] Vestavia.”

Norma Sample remembers teaching Fancher as a child.

“I taught here for years and years and years, but we didn’t really build much while I was here, did we?” Norma Sample said. “I can’t believe the growth [since then].” 

When Norma Sample moved there, she started out teaching at one of the churches called Crumbley’s Chapel and was hired based on a recommendation letter mailed by a past principal. The town was so small, people warned her she might not get a job.

“But when I got there, they said they never received a letter like that in all their lives,” she said.

Eventually, New Merkel School Principal E. A. Hollis, who Norma Sample said was a “wonderful man,” would tell her that recommendation letter was why they hired her, despite the few positions available. With Hollis helping with the town and schools, Cahaba Heights “really started to perk up,” Norma Sample said, over the course of her years teaching there.

Eventually, Norma Sample said they had their second child at St. Vincent's Hospital, and they knew they were in Cahaba Heights to stay. 

Fancher said Cahaba Heights was “very contained” and mainly made up of schools and churches, where she remembers walking out of her house for entire days to hang out with a family friend or go to the drug store to buy candy or swim at the Cahaba River. There was no fear back then, she said, when her parents moved to the area in 1949.

“Before that, people will say that it was a ‘wooly bully’ area back then, how there were moonshiners” and bootleggers during Prohibition, Fancher said. Due to this reputation, the Cahaba Heights Civic Club, then the unofficial governing body, changed the town name from New Merkel to Cahaba Heights in the ’50s.

Cahaba Heights has a different story than the “original” Vestavia Hills, Historical Society President Shelia Bruce said, and was originally populated by Native Americans. After the Civil War, a mining rush came to Birmingham and approximately eight miles southwest of downtown, an unincorporated mining village sprang up. “Mudtown,” as it was called, was the origin of Cahaba Heights.

The area later became known as New Merkel and then eventually Cahaba Heights. Hollis was a big proponent of changing the town’s name and reputation, the Sample said.

The area was named after engineer W. A. Merkle, who constructed the Birmingham Water Works’ Cahaba Pumping Station in the late 1800s. 

Fancher said when she was in school at Shades Valley, she remembers high levels of parent participation and the community being very church-oriented. 

At one point, all the local fathers gathered to build a stage for future plays and theatre. At another point, the citizens “rallied together and raised money” to build their own fire department, to signify they were “a real community,” Fancher said.

The community has always been sports-minded, and Bunny Sample remembers his son playing on the many fields.

“I remember [when we moved there] kids played ball, and they had a reputation of being tough and rough,” Norma Sample said.

According to “Cahaba Heights: Now and Then,” a 1986 history book of oral and written interviews by a Samford University graduate student in collaboration with a sixth grade social studies class at Cahaba Heights School, the area became one of the fastest growing communities in Jefferson County, and more and more families began to migrate from Birmingham “in search of peace and quiet.”

Perry said it’s not unusual for her to hear seniors at the New Merkel House talking about all the changes and reminiscing over how tight-knit the community used to be and, in a lot of ways, still is. She said the original program for the senior center, established in 1994, read: “Today a new chapter in our community has begun as Cahaba Heights and its citizens move forward by creating a center, which will become the focal point for a community with a rich history and a fierce pride.” 

The biggest change over the years to Cahaba Heights, Norma Sample said, has been the shopping centers, strip malls and drug stores, which have sprung up all around town. Plus, “the new restaurants, residential areas and more churches,” Perry said. 

These days, many of the original residents or their children, in addition to newer residents, Bruce said, have moved and ventured out to the Cahaba Heights area.

“You see, they had choices on where to live,” Bruce said. “Now I think they’re more connected. … I think we work well together.”

Although supporters and non-supporters of the Cahaba Heights annexation were deeply divided at the time, the annexation was only able to happen because a majority of the Cahaba Heights citizens voted in favor of it. 

Cahaba Heights citizens were divided, Fancher said, out of fear that the community would lose its independent, country charm, have to pay higher taxes and not get enough of a say in what happens in the city. Since then, much of the disapproval has petered out. Some people have all but forgotten that the Cahaba Heights area was never part of Vestavia Hills — though their original residents never have, Fancher said. 

“It’s interesting to know where we came from,” Fancher said. “If a young couple moves into Cahaba Heights now, they would just have no idea.”

This story was updated to reflect Vestavia Hills is the third-largest city in Jefferson County, not the state of Alabama.