Staff photo.
Shelia Bruce, a member of the Vestavia Hills Historical Society, is running point on managing and digitizing the archives the historical society has accumulated over the years.
Inside a small room tucked into the lowest floor of the Library in the Forest, Shelia Bruce is telling stories. She’s surrounded by the scrapbooks, maps and relics that tell the story of how a steep ridge once called “unlivable” became Vestavia Hills — one of the most admired cities in Alabama.
There’s a faded original city map rolled across a table, shelves full of old photo albums, and newspaper clippings from every major civic milestone organized in filing cabinets. Directly behind her sits a damaged, life-sized plaster statue — a relic that looks like it was hauled out of an ancient Roman ruin. And in a way, it was.
Bruce has spent the past 14 years as president of the Vestavia Hills Historical Society, and nearly four decades before that as an officer or volunteer. In June, she stepped down from her day-to-day leadership. A new president will be selected by the board and will take over officially in October. But her mark on the city’s legacy is permanent.
“I’ve lived in Vestavia Hills since 1975,” Bruce said. “So it’s getting, it’s 50 years.”
Bruce first got involved with the Historical Society when her children were young. Pat Barr and Preston Pannell invited her in, and she started as secretary under then-president Frances Poor. “I’ve held an office of some type since probably ’88, ’89,” she said. “History means a lot to me, and it’s been my honor.”
When Bruce became president, she realized that nearly all of the city’s documentation — its founding records, photos, family stories — existed only in hard copy. “It made me a little nervous,” she said. “If something happened to our library, God forbid … our history was gone.”
She set a goal to digitize every record the Historical Society had — including scrapbooks dating back to the 1980s — and to keep the city’s evolving story updated each year.
“We just finished it this year,” Bruce said. “All of our history’s caught up, scanned and in the cloud.”
As she walks through the room, she points to items with deep backstories: the first house built in the city, the names of early families, the original plans for fire and police services. “We have a story to tell,” she said.
She believes strongly that cities must preserve their past. “Someone once said if you don’t know your history and you don’t want to document it … you’re condemned to repeat it,” Bruce said. “How much of our history do we never want to repeat again? A lot.”
And yet, she notes, some history is worth repeating — or at least revisiting. In the corner of the archive sits one of the seven original statues from the George Ward estate — the one that gave Vestavia Hills its name. Ward, a former Birmingham mayor, modeled his estate after the Temple of Vesta in Rome. Most of the statues were destroyed in a senseless act of vandalism. But thanks to a phone call from a family who’d unknowingly preserved one in their basement for nearly 50 years, Bruce recovered a piece of the city’s most iconic landmark in 2019.
“There’s a few things wrong with her, but it’s fixable,” Bruce said. She doesn’t want to fully erase the statue’s scars. “That’s part of history.”
Bruce says she’s stepping back now not because the work is finished, but because it’s time. “I have a 90-year-old mother and small grandchildren who live in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “I want to visit them, see them grow up and be a part of their lives.”
But she hopes the next generation keeps the mission going — not just with records, but with vision. She imagines a virtual screen at City Hall where students can browse photos, maps and oral histories. “I would love for the next generation to get a screen that they can go in … and it has all the history,” she said. “And that it could be a place where schools could have field trips.”
As Vestavia Hills celebrates its 75th anniversary, Bruce’s fingerprints are all over the city’s collective memory — in every image scanned, every timeline organized, every name preserved. But her favorite part might be the stories — the ones she’s helped preserve and the ones still to come.
