The H Grill - Owned by Harold and James Hepburn - 1942

1908 Interview with Warren Brown, founder of Brown Printing Company ~

WARREN D. BROWN TALKS ON “BEFORE WAR TIMES”

Interview With The Man Who Was City Editor of The Advertiser in Ante-Bellum Days – Now Hale and Hearty

Warren D. Brown, before the war, City Editor of the Advertiser, now one of Montgomery’s most honored citizens has just celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday. Mr. Brown having left the newspaper profession in middle life accumulated a handsome fortune and is spending the evening of his life restfully and peacefully.

“I quit active business fifteen years ago,” said Mr. Brown to one of the many friends who congratulated him upon his birthday and upon his rugged health at that age. “I quit business fifteen years go and to that I attribute my good health and strength. I have had ‘no petty’ cares to harass and worry me and free from business, I intend to enjoy life.”

Mr. Brown came to Montgomery in 1848. He remembers distinctly how the Montgomery county court house looked when it sat in the middle of Court Square in that year. He has a vivid memory of the appearance of the first Capitol building that surmounted Capitol Hill until it was destroyed by fire in 1849. Mr. Brown was not a witness to the burning of the Capitol because in that year he had gone to Rome, Ga., to work on The Rome Herald.

Mr. Brown went to Rome a short while after he moved to Montgomery in 1848. He remained there only until 1851 when he returned to Montgomery. Since that he has been an active and prominent figure in the life of the city.

On returning to the city he became city editor of the Advertiser, then published by Cloud and Walker. He was in charge of that department of the paper in the stirring and troublous times that witnessed the birth of “the storm cradled nation that fell.”

A story he wrote in 1861, as part of his daily duties on the paper, has since become a historical document of the greatest value. It describes the coming and welcome to President Jefferson Davis when he came to Montgomery to assume charge of the Confederate government in 1861. A special committee from the Alabama Legislature, with a number of prominent citizens of Montgomery went to West Point to welcome Mr. Davis as soon as he reached Alabama soil and to accompany him to Montgomery, the capitol of the new nation.

All the stories dealing with the secession of the States, the meeting of the Confederate Congress, the inauguration exercises and the formation and muster in of the various military companies were written by Mr. Brown. No newspaperman in Alabama, perhaps, ever handled larger stories than he while the Nation was being formed and defended.

Mr. Brown was a personal friend and associate of such famous writers as Matt Blue and John J. Hooper, the noted humorist, who wrote “Simon Suggs.” He was a witness of the fight between Mr. Blue and Mr. Hooper over rival publications, a fight in which neither was seriously injured. Some years after the war, Mr. Brown quit the newspaper business for good and all.

“At that time,” he said, “I was Marshall and Liberian of the Supreme Court and I was employed by The Montgomery Mail to write its local news at $25 a week. For my Capitol work I was receiving a salary of $1,000 a year. That was good money in those troublous times and I thought if I could continue to draw those two salaries I would get rich. I saw, though, that the time would come when I would have to give up my Capitol duties and when Mr. Barrett, who afterward became my partner, offered me a chance in the job printing business I resigned.”

That was the foundation of the well-known printing house of the Brown Printing Company, which is prosperous to this day and from which Mr. Brown has made a handsome fortune.

“How does Montgomery of 1848 compare with Montgomery of 1908?” said Mr. Brown, “Why, there is no comparison. There is the same difference as there is between a village and a city. Court Square has changed completely, as has the entire business section of he city. The old Madison House was, however, standing on the corner of Perry and Dexter Avenue when I came to Montgomery. I sopped there my first night in Montgomery. I had been born in Jacksonville, Ala., and as a boy of 15 came to this city to make my fortune. Judge Samuel F. Rice happened to be on the stage with me, the stage that came in from Talladega. When we came from Wetumpka on what is now the Lower Wetumpka Road. It was then known as the Plank Road by reason of the fact that it was poorly paved with plank. That used to be a theory of those days – that a road could be built of plank. When we got to Montgomery Judge Rice showed me the Madison House and advised me to top there. From then until now I have lived in Montgomery, except the short while I was at Rome.”

Asked as to how newspaper work was done in ante-bellum days, Mr. Brown said

“I was not only the city editor of The Advertiser, I was the whole reportorial force. I not only located all city news, but I wrote it up myself. If I wrote a whole column I thought I had done a good day’s work. I hardly suppose a good reporter in these days would not consider a column any big day’s work, but I was satisfied with it in those days.

“Then I was telegraphic editor too. Oh yes, we had telegraphic news in those days. But there were no messenger boys. The telegraph office as over Levystein’s store, overlooking Court Square, the same place from which the order was sent to ‘fire on Fort Sumter. I had to go down every night to wait for the telegraph news to come in. It came in slowly too. We had only a few telegrams and each night I would catch my sleep on the table while waiting for our items over the wire.”

Few men who reach the age of 75 are heartier that Mr. Brown. He spends nearly the entire year in Montgomery, but he takes time to make an annual visit to Saratoga Springs, a custom which he has kept up for many years.

Brown Printing Company is an outgrowth of the Barrett & Brown Company formed on Commerce Street by Milo Barrett and Warren D. Brown when they came home from the disbanded Confederate Army in the fall of 1865. They were located on Commerce next to the Exchange Hotel.

Barrett sold his interest in the firm to James H. Armstrong in September 1887 and the following month Armstrong, Warren D. Brown, William R. Hale and James H. Crenshaw formed a corporation and changed the name to Brown Printing Company.

Crenshaw, who was one of the first employees of the original company, and his family acquired all outstanding stock on May 25, 1907. In 1912, the Crenshaw’s moved Brown Printing into a three-story, 19,000-square-foot building at 255 Dexter Avenue. Crenshaw left his mark on the building with the letter ‘C’ in the top right and left corners.

David Fleming

DAVID FLEMING was born in Fifeshire, Scotland, July 9, 1849. He immigrated to Montgomery, Ala. in 1859. In 1869 he was employed by John Yung as manager of Yung’s restaurant. On the death of Mr. Yung in 1873, David Fleming became proprietor of the business. 

In 1890 he opened Fleming’s which became one of Montgomery’s most elegant restaurants. It was located on Monroe Street, about where the back entrance to Kress is now located. The posh Victorian, drapery and gas chandeliered establishment, catered to the well-to-do from the city and prosperous planters from all over the area. Mr. Fleming is credited by many with having imported the first oysters to the city. Fleming’s later moved around to Court Street and changed ownership several times before closing shortly before World War I.

Fleming's was a favorite spot for actors from the Montgomery Theater. For years a favorite story was told about the night that John Wilkes Booth shocked himself and his friends into soberness by reciting the Lord's Prayer.

Lee's Grill - 12 Commerce Street

Lee’s Grill was on the east side of the street between Alabama National Bank and “The Union.” Not so very wide, but seeming to reach nearly through the block to North Court, Lee’s was owned and operated by Lee Pake. The food was OK, the service fast, but its real appeal was it convivial, yet cosmopolitan aura that catered to coffee cliques of railroad men, bankers, investment brokers, businessmen, shopkeepers and politicians. It was big enough to accommodate them all at one time, giving the place the flavor of a livestock auction and the New York Stock Exchange combined. In the years right after World War II, there were few places other than downtown for gatherings of such diverse groups, and for several decades Lee’s drew coffee drinkers and diners from all over town. – Remember When by Tom Connor

Chester's Restaurant

Danny's Diner

Danny's Diner - Danny Long was a promising young catcher in the Montreal Royals when a play at home plate resulted in a bad shoulder injury. It was a grim day for Danny when the doctors gave him the bad news that his baseball days were probably over.

While nursing his physical ills and wondering how he was going to earn a living, he met the owner of a diner in Trenton, New Jersey.
Lacking anything better to do, he began helping the counter whenever he could. That did it. A quick trip back to his home town of Montgomery, Alabama, proved two things. Montgomery did not have a modern diner, and Montgomery businessman was willing to lend Danny a hand financially.

Back North, Danny ordered a diner. While it was taking shape in a New Jersey factory- a process that usually takes about four months- he went about getting experience by taking odd jobs in various diners in the vicinity. When off duty, he hung around the factory and watched a diner grow from plans on a drawing board to completion.

“Danny’s Diner” packed them in at the corner of Bainbridge and Madison Avenues in downtown Montgomery. Among other things, it had the distinction of being the first modern restaurant-type diner to begin operations in Alabama.