Issue link: https://alabamapower.uberflip.com/i/1021328
27 since 1927. For the past 68 years, workers have stood in line outside diminutive Daniel's Drive Inn for hamburgers and fries. Sue's Chic Cafe has long aracted breakfast and lunch crowds, and is a favorite for its homestyle meat-and-three meals for under $9, drink included. Greek immigrant John Couscos opened Milano's Restaurant in 1976 and continues serving spaghei and European specialties in a spacious dining room each day. Newly paved streets are commonplace around Valley, but people are still driven by their shared history. Fairfax, Langdale, Riverview and Shawmut all have large districts on the National Register of Historic Places, totaling more than 1,200 structures within the contemporary city limits. Just past the Alabama Power Crew Headquarters and Warehouse stands "the Coon Duck," a blue wood-frame building that in 1914 housed the area's first public kindergarten and library. It is named for the tough denim-like fabric that was a major product of the mills for many years, much of it sold to the military and railroads for making tents. While the huge textile mill buildings are disappearing from each of the communities that make up Valley, few of the original village houses have been demolished. They remain, for the most part, well-kept with manicured yards. Some of the houses were built of native stone, which is also prominent in walls between homes, along streets and separating many cemetery plots. In front of the remnants of Langdale Mill stands the "Kissing Bridge," built over the creek workers crossed for decades, where their spouses and children saw them off for the next shi. Just beyond the building's east front corner stands "Rusty" and his wife, child and two dogs. The steel family was fashioned by artist Chuck Moore from discarded pieces of the Chaahoochee Valley Railroad. Just down the street is the Horace King Memorial Bridge, a covered structure constructed in 2003 in the style of the former slave engineer who bought his own freedom in 1846 and built bridges across the South. Next to Memorial Park is a vacated iron and concrete bridge facing the entrance to Langdale Mill village, where a tiny lane leads downhill to a secluded park that is one of Valley's few current openings to the Chaahoochee. On a Friday aernoon, fish are jumping and turtles The Cotton Duck was Valley's first kindergarten and library more than a century ago; the Kissing Bridge is across the street. Demolished textile mill along the banks of the Chattahoochee River.