Cloverdale, Montgomery
Cloverdale is a neighborhood within the American city of Montgomery, Alabama. It is the largest garden-landscaped neighborhood in the state of Alabama. Built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is one of Montgomery's "genteel" areas. The term serves two purposes: the "original" Cloverdale area, and the larger area, which includes other historic neighborhoods such as Cloverdale-Idlewild.
Purchased by William Graham in 1817, Cloverdale rests in a portion of the original 160-acre (0.65 km2) lot. This area of land was originally called "Graham's Woods" because of its thick growth and distance from the city of Montgomery. The landscape was covered with virgin pines, a few of which still exist on the lawns of some Cloverdale homes. Consequently, this area was sometimes called "The Pines" in addition to the name "Graham's Woods". In addition to the pine trees, there were also a number of open glens where clover grew in abundance, and this seems to be the likely origin of the name, Cloverdale, which was adopted in 1892.
The picturesque natural garden landscape developed in Europe during the early 19th century and was popularized during the mid-century in America by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted was America's preeminent landscape architect and responsible for a number of nineteenth century residential suburbs, including Riverside (1869) in Chicago and Druid Hills (1893) in Atlanta, Georgia.
The plan for Cloverdale has basic qualities which are similar to Olmsted's suburban residential designs elsewhere around the country. Olmsted was at work on the landscape plan for the Alabama State Capitol grounds in Montgomery in 1889, contemporary with the early development of Cloverdale. No documentation, however, has yet surfaced to substantiate any definite Olmsted influence.
A more likely designer of Cloverdale was the English landscape architect Joseph Forsyth Johnson, who emigrated to America in the 1870s after a successful career designing the grounds for a number of estates in England, Ireland and Russia. A comparison of Cloverdale with Johnson's design for the residential suburb Inman Park in Atlanta reveals some remarkable similarities. Both, for example, had proposed lake sites and both have long, narrow, central park areas surrounded by curving streets.
The earliest documentation discovered for the construction of a house in Cloverdale is from a letter dated 1892. This house, which was located on the corner of what is now Felder Avenue and Norman Bridge Road, was demolished for an apartment complex in the late 1940s.
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