Monday, August 30, 2010
Lost Memphis Memories of "Monkey Mountain"
Posted by Vance Lauderdale on Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:30 PM
Everyone called it "Monkey Mountain."
Today, it's a nicely manicured park with soccer fields and a walking path. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this area was a vast wasteland, rutted with deep ravines and vine-covered trees. Naturally, it was a magnet for any child living in the neighborhood, who could play "army" or Tarzan or anything they wanted in this jungle. Not too long ago, I made a rare public appearance before the Sea Isle Park Neighborhood Association, and my visit prompted long-ago memories of just what, exactly, Monkey Mountain actually was.
Danny Milam, whose family lived in the area in the 1950s and '60s, remembers it this way:
"I read with interest your article in the July edition, "Estate Planning." I lived in that area when I was young (on White Station Road, just north of Sea Isle Road) and never knew about the grand plans for the area. Pity it never came to fruition. It would have been cool.
"But then again, if it had, my family probably couldn't have afforded to live there.
"The undeveloped area around Sea Isle School was enormous. Even with the development of a park with a lighted baseball field, there was still a hefty tract of unimproved acreage that just sat there for years. In the area slightly northeast of where a lake was proposed was an odd land formation featuring many deep rills and ditches that couldn't be explained. If it had been on a steep hill, one could understand all the rills and crevasses, but it was flat. (This is Memphis, after all.) Now that I've read your article, I wonder if perhaps some preliminary earthwork was done and then abandoned when the grandiose plans for Country Club Estates fell through.
[It IS possible, I suppose, that this "land formation" was leftover fill from the developers scooping out the lake proposed for the area. — Vance]
"It looked like an area used for WWI-era trench warfare. In fact, that's how we used it, employing dirt clods instead of rifles to fend off the enemy combatants. Yes, the ditches were deep enough to crouch in and seek cover from an assault.
"Everyone in the neighborhood called this tract of odd topography "Monkey Mountains." No one knew how it got that name, or why, because there was certainly nothing there that brought up images of mountains. A better name would have been "Monkey Canyon."
Another fellow from the neighborhood — perhaps a victim of Danny Milam's dirt-clod battles — was Tommy Crawford, who sent these memories along:
"I remember Monkey Mountain very well. It got its name from the monkey mountain at the zoo. It was just a high hill there at Sea Isle and Estate. Kids would flock from everywhere to play on it. This also added to the name; kids looked like a bunch of monkeys running up and down it. There were large trees with natural vine swings. With the Tarzan movies being very popular, you could hear Tarzan and Cheetah all throughout the woods.
"Also, the whole area, which is now a park, was full of huge erosion ditches 10 to 20 feet deep; we would run in those ditches forever. So the whole area was a natural playground for all of us in the neighborhood during the '50s. Then came progress, and everything was leveled and Monkey Mountain was no more. But I still remember and comment about it every once in a while to the folks that live here in the area today. God, I'm getting old now. They are very happy memories, and the dirt-clod fights got kind of rough at times, too."
Thanks for the memories and descriptions, Danny and Tommy.
Now: where are some PHOTOS of this place?
Comments (8)
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Somewhere among the "Hoarder"-worthy piles of stuff at my mother's house (just east of Estate where I grew up 1961-1973) there must be some photos showing parts of Monkey Mountains. My friends and I (Kenny Rodgers and David Bodkin to name just a few) used to fight the dirt-clod battles and have the other adventures already mentioned by others there; the place was especially interesting (i.e. dangerous) at night.
One of my most vivid childhood memories is taking the fun way home (across the scrubland and gullies) from Sea Isle Elementary. There was a knob and some brush and trees over to the north side, about where the lines of Knollwood and Wheaton would cross if they were extended west and south respectively. One afternoon in the fall, we went in there silently and soon lost all sight of civilization. We continued on, keyed up as if we feared an ambush, and then FWAP! a covey of birds burst out of the underbrush. We yelped and tried not to look too obviously scared, (not very successfully).
I recall that, and a few other incidents, like it was yesterday.
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As a side item to this, is it known where "Sea Isle" came from? I always thought it was a strange name for Memphis (Like "Ocean View Farm" in Germantown) but assumed the rest of the neighborhood had tropical names. After an exhaustive minute's search using Google Maps it appears that is not the case and there is nary a street around that would suggest why "Sea Isle" came about.
The name "Sea Isle" for this school has never been explained (not to me, anyway). It is certainly pretty far from the sea, or any "isle" (except for Mud Island and various sandbars in the river). Just west of Overton High School, in the Perkins/Willow area, you can find a number of resort- or tropical-themed streets, including Capri and Tahiti, and once again, I think the developers were just enjoying flights of fancy.
The school is named for the street, I'm almost positive. Ocean View Farm was named by the people who owned it b/c the wife wanted to live somewhere with an ocean view. She got Germantown instead.
Sea Isle parallels Capri and Tahiti and dead-ends at Jamaica. I'd say that area was probably built at the same time, then Sea Isle expanded north and then east and, unlike most Memphis streets, kept the same name from one end to the other.
Aha! Thanks Jeff. I guess I looked at the map 'til Sea Isle stopped but forgot the olde Memphis trick of streets reappearing a few miles later in a different neighborhood. I just looked on a larger scale and see tropical names like Nassau right next to Yorkshire which believe me is as UN-tropical as you can get. What were the planners thinking? Maybe it was Margarita Monday back then.
Growing up on Rolling Oaks Drive in East Memphis, one Saturday afternoon around the Summer of 1972 or 1973, my friend (Alex Stagoski from the Balmoral area) and I were riding bikes on "Monkey Mountain." A photographer from the Memphis Press Scimitar (the former afternoon newspaper in Memphis) took our pictures riding bikes and got our names and ages. It was published in the newspaper the next day but I lost my copy years ago. Galen A. Smith Sr., Bowling Green, Kentucky www.acriticfromthesouth.blogspot.com
Thanks, Galen. Old photographs and articles from the Press-Scimitar are available to the public, thanks to the diligent efforts of the staff at the Special Collections Department, University of Memphis Libraries. Even they, however, had no control over the crazy way these files were indexed. Everything was tucked away in millions and millions (or so it seemed) of manilla folders, and they PS librarian tended to cram seemingly unrelated items into the same folders. There are no folders labeled simply "Monkey Mountain" or "Country Club Estates" and the one for Sea Isle School contains just a few clippings that aren't relevant here. There's little chance I will find a folder with just your name on it. The PS guy, if he decided the story/photo were worth filing at all, might have crammed it under such vague topics as "Bicycles" or "Play" or sometimes just "General." Sometimes I find the best pictures just by accident. But knowing that a photo does exist will inspire me to keep searching, so thanks for the tip.
