Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Lost Memphis Overton Park's Little Log Cabin
Posted by Vance Lauderdale on Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 2:26 PM
Anyway, I was rummaging through my old postcards archived in the Lauderdale Library, searching for other images of that garden, when I came across these two cards, and thought I'd share them with you. Why? Because they actually pay me to do this. Hard to believe, but it's true.
After they — and I don't know who, exactly, "they" were, since I wasn't around at the time — but as I was saying, after "they" demolished the Japanese Garden after the attack on Pearl Harbor, "they" were left with a little empty island in the middle of the lake, so "they" put a rather bleak little fountain there. And here's an image of it, below. Oh, I could stare at it for hours!
But at some point, "they" erected a cute little log cabin on the island, as you can see in the top image. I have no idea how large (or small) this structure was; somebody should have stood beside it when they snapped the photograph, to provide a sense of scale. What were you thinking, cameraman? And I also don't know what purpose it served, or where it came from, or what happened to it, so please don't ask me about any of that.
What I DO know is that this is not the present-day Rainbow Lake in Overton Park. This lake, as I've said before, was filled in when they constructed the Memphis Academy of Arts complex.
And that concludes today's history lesson on Overton Park.
Comments (5)
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Wow, that certainly is a miserable fountain ... clearly "they" spared no expense on design or use of rubble from a construction site! The pavilion looks very "mod" though. Looking at the cabin those are either monster swans or a tiny cabin ... maybe it was a shelter for the swans? Maybe it was where the Peabody ducks first settled in Shelby County before they struck it rich and moved into their palace?
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Yeah, the swan gives it scale. I don't think the swan could fit through the cabin door. Maybe it was meant to be an optical illusion, to make the lake look bigger than it was.
BTW, it looks like Granny's cabin on the Beverly Hillbillies - the one out back by the cement pond and the big pink chickens. How appropriate.
I believe that they did spare no expense ... that is granite curbing ... price it now ...
I may have written you before about Rainbow Lake in my early days. It was the lake which was east of the Doughboy at the far end of the large play area, and formed the west boundary for the winding road which followed the lake in this region. It was the lake that the large goldfish removed from the Japanese garden lake were placed. And it was the lake that I fished in at that time in which I caught the goldfish and carried them home to my mother to ask her to cook them for a meal! I have a photo of me and my cousin Robert Gracey fishing the lake during this period. Rainbow Lake had no connection to the region adjacent to the parking lot now adjacent to the Memphis Academy of Art.
I just read a halloween roundup of ghosts of Memphis and it mentioned a young woman stabbed to death in the 1960s whose body was found floating in the lake, and has been seen to rise up out of the water. Of course anyone in the Park after dark would just HAVE to be a sober, credible witness, right?
