William Reed residence

The William Reed residence, also called the Reed Riddle Jemison house, is a residence located at 888 Twin Lake Drive in Huffman.

The core of the house, built as a log cabin, is believed to be the oldest surviving residence within the city limits of Birmingham. It was erected by William "Silver Dollar Billy" Reed, who traveled to the area from North Carolina with his parents, John and Elizabeth Reed, his wife, the former Ruth Evans and their eleven children.

The original 18-foot by 22-foot two-room cabin with two hearths and a storage loft was constructed between 1816 and 1820 from trees felled on the site, near the spring which is the source of Five Mile Creek. The Reeds arrived as squatters, without title to the land they settled, but William Reed soon purchased 80 acres between Mount Pinson and Self Creek where his children eventually started their own farmsteads. He was able to buy another 1,040 acres, including the land his house stood on, at an auction in Tuscaloosa in August 1821. He outbid Williamson Hawkins for the parcel. Reed's older sons Robert and John, also purchased properties at that auction. In the 1830s or 1840s a wood-framed addition was made to the west side of the cabin. Another addition created an L-shaped shed around the northeast corner of the house.

When William Reed died in 1856, the house passed to Robert, and then to his youngest son, John Thomas Reed. He occupied the cabin with his wife, the former Betty Detuy of Elyton, and raised a family there. He sold the home in 1885 to his son-in-law, Thomas Riddle, who had married Hallie Catherine Reed a year earlier. The Riddles enlarged the house with two rooms and an entrance hall across the front, with two gables above. A covered porch wrapped the north and east sides. The house was further enlarged in the early 1920s, and a "bathing room" (with no running water), was added in 1922.

They raised seven children there before selling the house, on June 1, 1925, to developer Robert Jemison, Jr. Jemison dubbed the old homestead Spring Lake Farms and used it as a retreat. He removed the wall between the entrance hall and one of the front rooms to create a large living room on the southwest, and rebuilt its fireplace in brick. He also dug out a small basement to house a furnace, replaced the porch posts with larger square wood columns, and added a sunroom facing the spring-fed lake which inspired the name of the estate. He also planted boxwoods which he obtained from Joe Wheeler's estate in North Alabama. In the 1930s and '40s additional alterations were made to the house, adding a kitchen and breakfast room onto the rear and screening in two bays of the front porch.

In 1947 Jemison sold the property to Emmett Ware, who subdivided the former farm into a residential neighborhood of 94 homes surrounding what was now called Twin Lakes. During his ownership, the Living Room was expanded into the screened-in part of the porch. In the late 1970s Ware added glazed openings to the gables and removed weatherboards from the east side of the original cabin, exposing the underlying log construction.

The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

References

• "Polly Reed: Alabama’s First Traveling Saleslady" (August 2002)