POWERGRAMS

30 well-liked in his hometown. e band, however, has never said if the song is about an actual person. Danny Cooper managed the Eutaw Office and others in the Black Belt during his 38-year career with Alabama Power. His family moved to town in 1960 when Cooper was an eighth-grader. He never expected to stay so long. "I always thought when I retired we'd move," says Cooper, who cleared out his work desk four years ago. "But we've got so many great friends, we just remodeled our house and love living in Eutaw. It's a great little town with just four red lights. I tell people, 'If you've got more than four red lights, your town is too big.'" Kirkwood One of America's most famous houses, Kirkwood is the face of Eutaw. Google recognized the familiarity of the Greek Revival mansion by noting it was viewed online more than 1 million times in one year. Named for cotton merchant Foster Kirksey, who began building it in 1858, the three-story wood frame structure topped by a large cupola was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. However, because of the Civil War, Kirkwood was not completed as Kirksey had envisioned until the early 1980s. Today it is impossible for visitors to miss Kirkwood upon entering town, its eight white columns towering above trees atop a hill. It is surrounded by a ditch dug by Kirksey to be reminiscent of an English castle moat, but that feature was never finished. Despite being incomplete, by 1934 the house was included in the Historic American Buildings Survey of the Library of Congress. Kirkwood remained in the Kirksey family until 1953, when it was deeded to a family friend and fell into neglect. Washington, D.C., attorney Roy Swayze bought and restored Kirkwood in the 1970s, winning the admiration of President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan, then the National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award in 1982, followed by the grand prize in the 1997 Great American Homes Awards. e Swayzes went to great lengths to complete the house as Kirksey had planned. Many items Kirksey had ordered from abroad never made it to his house, being confiscated by federal troops, who for a time occupied Kirkwood. e Swayzes hired New Orleans craftsmen to forge antebellum-like railings for the second-floor balcony from which Kirksey's young daughter had fallen to her death. Kirksey had built a cupola to watch supplies for the house coming in from the river, but it was blown off during a storm in the 1930s. e Swayzes found a mansion being demolished in Livingston, bought the cupola, transported it to Eutaw and had it raised to Kirkwood's roof. Swayze died in 1987 and his widow, Mary, sold Kirkwood in 1998. A new owner planned to open a bed and breakfast but unanticipated costs and delays pushed it into foreclosure in 2000. Al and Danky Blanton, of Jasper, bought the house, did renovations and opened for tours in 2001 but before his death all of the contents, including original furnishings, were auctioned off. Norris and Rebecca Sears of Woodstock, Georgia, were friends of the Blantons and bought Kirkwood 10 years ago. e Sears had purchased historic White Columns in Eutaw in 2002 but Blanton "just wouldn't hush until we bought Kirkwood," Norris Sears says. e Sears, in turn, sold White Columns to a man from Salt Lake City. "We worked on Kirkwood for about nine months, mostly on cosmetics inside," says Sears, noting that exterior painting will begin soon, which is an expensive but necessary job every decade or so. e major project for the Sears was furnishing the house. She is a decorator and he collects antiques, so it was an undertaking they enjoyed. ey insisted that everything originate from 1845 to 1870, eventually filling Kirkwood with American rosewood canopy beds, chairs, tables and tall wardrobes, as well as European porcelains and original paintings by Southern artists. Many of the furnishings were moved from White Columns or the Sears' home near Atlanta. ose furnishings fit right in with Kirkwood's hand- carved marble mantels from Italy that Kirksey bought more than 160 years ago when he spared no expense to make his house unique. However, Sears' toughest job was fitting a bed he bought in New Orleans into the third-floor former billiard room. He brought several large employees from his Atlanta air-conditioning company to help carry the 350-pound headboard up three flights of stairs. EUTAW Kirkwood column; Greene County Courthouse built in 1869.

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