District Maps & Information

The Downtown Historic District (PDF) was designated in 2001. Its boundaries are North on 2nd Avenue, East to N. 3rd and 6th Street, South on Avenue C, and West on 10th Street. The Railroad Avenue district has historically been the City's business center, an area equally distant from all City boundaries. One of its focal points is the Lee County Courthouse. The courthouse, whose tower-and those of nearby churches-command the skyline of the city, faces East. Descriptions of the original appearance of the district indicate that it was a collection of small wooden buildings, with warehouses concentrated on both sides of the railroad. After the 1868 fire, one and two story brick buildings, usually massed in solid blocks, replaced the earlier structures. The districts major building phase occurred from the 1880s to the 1920s; the architectural character of the buildings is representative of the plain style of that period. Building forms are simple, with flat roofs and projecting cornices. The materials are typically brick, with brick or stone articulation. Structures have flat arched windows or openings, terra cotta ornamentation, and Eastlake and Victorian wood work.

The Geneva Historic District (PDF) was designated in 2007. Its irregular boundaries are North on Avenue C, East on 7th and Glenn Street, South to Stowe Avenue, and East on Glenn and 10th Street. The Geneva Historic District is located just south of the Downtown Historic District and consists primarily of residential properties dating from the 1809s through the 1920s. This district contains Opelika's finest collection of domestic architecture and features some of the City's earliest and best examples of Carpenter Gothic, Queen Ann influenced houses and cottages, and Arts and Crafts bungalows. A significant number of Opelika's leading businessmen and professionals selected the area encompassing the Geneva Street district for their home sites. In addition to affording its residents convenience to local churches, schools and the important East Alabama commercial trade center, the neighborhood offered a pleasant setting with large lots, paved streets (the first of local residential areas) and sporadically placed triangular park areas-a distinction of the Geneva Street area not found elsewhere in the City.

The Pepperell Mill and Village Opens in New Window  was added to the National Registry in 2014.  Its boundaries are North on Pepperell Parkway, East to 22^nd Street, South to 1^stAvenue, and West to 30^th Street.  Like most textile companies in Alabama and throughout the South in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Pepperell Manufacturing Company constructed a mill village to house its employees.  Owned and built by the company, mill villages typically included housing, as well as community buildings such as churches, schools, and recreational facilities.[1]  The first section of the village was laid out in 1925 along streets that were laid out in a grid pattern.[2]  In the 1930s, the Pepperell Company expanded the mill village to the west to accommodate the growing number of workers.  The western section of the mill village features curvilinear streets typical of garden suburbs of the 1930s.[3]  Company-owned housing for upper-level management (now demolished) was located north of Pepperell Parkway, near the factory and mill village but separated from it, reinforcing the distinction between workers and management.[4] 

The Pepperell Mill and Mill Village Historic District is a collection of representative examples of textile mill residential, industrial, commercial, religious, and recreational architecture from 1925 to circa 1960. Standardized mill type housing, many with Craftsman style details, include dwellings and duplexes illustrating common folk forms such as gable fronts, pyramidal, and massed plan variations.

[1] Pamela Sterne King, “Comfort Under Control: Alabama’s Textile Mill Villages,” Alabama Heritage 73 (Summer 2004: 16-20;  Wayne Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1989), pp. 98, 101.

[2] Knowlton, p. 336; Lanier; “Pepperell Mfg. Co. - Opelika, Ala. [plat],” 1946, Deed Room, Lee County Courthouse, Opelika, Alabama.

[3] David L. Ames, and Linda Flint McClelland,  Historic Residential Suburbs: Guidelines for Evaluation and Documentation for the National Register of Historic Places (National Register Bulletin, National Park Service, 2002), pp. 41-43.  The existing sources suggest that there were at least two phases of house construction in the village in the 1930s:  one in 1934, and one in 1938.  See Pepperell Mill & Village, 1947 (Opelika, Alabama: The Museum of East Alabama, n.d.), clippings from 1934; Knowlton, p. 336; and Lanier.

[4] “Pepperell Mfg. Co. - Opelika, Ala. [plat],” 1946; Pepperell Manufacturing Company, p. 41.  The 1946 plat shows these houses and identifies the occupants as Mr. Baum, Mr. [Homer] Carter, and Mr. Williams.