COLUMBUS – The Red Rose Cafe. The neighborhood basketball court near Second Street North. More than a dozen stores, mostly named for their owners.
All are heralded landmarks of a once thriving – or at least once standing – Burns Bottom neighborhood near downtown. Then there were the “side hustles,” where people came back from their 8-to-5s to sell fish, hot dogs and hamburgers for an extra buck.
But for LuCretia Jackson, maybe the most notable landmark was her grandmother June Fort’s home on Fourth Street North. There, just about every weekend, children from all over the neighborhood would come over to eat big meals and stay the night.
The spread?
“Everything,” Jackson said Saturday, standing under a tent outside Munson and Brothers during the inaugural Burns Bottom Reunion. “We had chicken, dressing, chitlins …”
She said her grandmother even made something called frocklin, which Jackson described as dressing cooked with chicken, cornbread, broth and tomatoes.
Jackson has lived much of her life on Fourth Street North, growing up in her grandmother’s home and later inheriting another family home down the street after her aunt passed away.
She also was one of the last residents to leave Burns Bottom in 2021, finally accepting an offer from the Columbus Redevelopment Authority to buy her home and relocate her to Hemlock Street in East Columbus. The CRA soon tore down the home as part of an effort to redevelop five blocks of the blighted neighborhood for higher-value residential and commercial spaces.
When Jackson learned demolition was complete at the house – where she said seven generations of her family had lived – she drove her to the lot and had her photo taken in front of it.
“I was happy with the offer,” she said of leaving the neighborhood. “I’m happy where I am. … (But) don’t forget where you came from.”
To that end, Jackson served on a committee that brought several back to “The Bottom” for the weekend reunion, a seven-hour affair of food, fellowship and music she hopes will become an annual event.
‘A baby in the dirt’
Among those attending was Rodney Vaughn, who at different times has lived in Chicago and Las Vegas and has most recently moved to the Mississippi Delta. But he was delivered into this world by a midwife inside a house on the corner of Third Street and Fifth Avenue North that sat on stilts.
Vaughn’s grandmother worked at the former Holiday Inn on Highway 45, he said. When he was 2, she was sitting with his mother on their porch during lunch when his grandmother realized she was late getting back to work.
“She jumped up, but she had me in her lap,” Vaughn said. “I flew out of her lap and hit the ground. So, you know, I can’t be nothing but Burns Bottom. I was a baby in the dirt.”
Vaughn left Columbus with his family at age 3, but they returned when he was 11. He stayed through high school, then left again to join the military.
The basketball court, where he played often with his friends, had no nets on the goals. It was in a small park that he remembered also had a merry-go-round, monkey bars and a slide on land that is now part of the Roger Short Soccer Complex.
What Vaughn said he remembers most about Burns Bottom, though, is a sense of community where everyone helped each other and “shared everything.”
“We all grew up in other people’s clothes,” he said.
‘We’ve got pictures. … We’ve got stories’
Victor Moody, 54, grew up in his grandmother’s house on Fourth Street North, right next door to Jackson.
“We had a ball down here,” he said Saturday, smiling.
His most vivid memory there wasn’t quite as happy. He was about 5 in 1973 when the infamous flood that damaged so much of Columbus wreaked havoc in Burns Bottom.
“The water was so high you could see just the tips of the houses on Third Street,” he recalled. “… You could actually see the water rising, coming up the street. Luckily, we were (living) up on a hill, but the water still came up to the front steps.”
Moody, a lifelong Columbus resident who is retired from Baldor Electric Company, moved out of Burns Bottom after graduating high school and now lives in the North Haven Woods subdivision. His grandmother stayed in Burns Bottom until she died. Like many others, her house, where Moody’s four children often visited, was also torn down to make room for redevelopment.
That won’t stop Moody from teaching his eight grandchildren what it was like in the old neighborhood.
“We’ve got pictures and all that,” he said. “We’ve got stories. We’re definitely going to let them know where we came from.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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