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Delano Park

1887 establishments in AlabamaParks in Decatur, Alabama
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The Delano Park, operated by the Decatur Parks and Recreation Board, is the oldest park in the city of Decatur, Alabama. It was created in 1887, as part of a master plan to "re-invent" the City of Decatur, then New Decatur. The city created the "Decatur Land Improvement and Furnace Company" for this specific purpose. The company employed a landscape architect by the name of Nathan Franklin Barrett to design a whole new city that had been ravaged by a yellow fever epidemic and the Civil War. The park was designed to be the focal point of the entire plan. The park, named after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's mother, was dedicated in the 1930s by Roosevelt himself and later named in her honor as part of a newspaper contest, which sought to commemorate his vision for municipal parks across America. The land was donated to the city of Albany as part of the New Deal, which included a large plan to develop the poverty-ridden city. The park remained mostly a solitary attraction on the fringe of downtown as the only large park in town during that era. This changed in the mid-1950s when the new Decatur High School constructed a new school building to replace an overcrowding "Riverside" High School building. The far eastern end once consisted of a swimming pool called the "Blue Haven". This pool has since been filled in, and the Decatur High marching band now uses a practice field that was created over the former swimming area. The middle portion of the park contains a children's playground, the new "Splash Pad", and a ditch with a concrete bridge donated to the park. The bridge was moved in the 1930s from Ferry Street to accentuate the beauty of the park and has been a favorite location for young and old alike ever since.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Delano Park (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Delano Park
Johnston Street Southeast,

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 34.597 ° E -86.975 °
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Albany Heritage Neighborhood Historic District

Johnston Street Southeast
35601
Alabama, United States
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Southern Railway Depot (Decatur, Alabama)
Southern Railway Depot (Decatur, Alabama)

The Southern Railway Depot is a historic building in Decatur, Alabama. The depot was built in 1904–05 along the Southern Railway line. Decatur had become a transportation hub of North Alabama by the 1870s, with its connections to the Tennessee River, the east–west Tuscumbia, Courtland and Decatur Railroad (later operated by the Memphis and Charleston Railroad and the Southern Railway), and the north–south Louisville and Nashville Railroad. The Southern's last train through the city was the Tennessean (Memphis-Washington, D.C., discontinued, 1968). The last train by the L&N, and the train with the last route going south toward Alabama's largest cities, was the Pan-American, (Cincinnati-New Orleans) which ended in 1971. Other L&N trains passing through were the Azalean (Cincinnati-New Orleans) and the Humming Bird (Cincinnati-New Orleans). The depot last functioned as a passenger station in 1979, when Amtrak cancelled its (Chicago-St. Petersburg / Miami) Floridian service. The station is built of brick painted white, with quoins on the corners. The building has a rectangular central section with narrower wings stretching along the tracks. The central section has a hipped roof, while the wings have gable roofs; both have deep eaves with decorative brackets. The main entrance is covered by a porte-cochère with arched openings. The depot was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.