Mayor of Birmingham from 1899 to 1905. Born in 1851 in Arkadelphia, the son of a Blount and Walker County family, he personally owned the Blount Springs resort at its peak, from 1900 to 1914, and died in 1926. Local tradition holds that Drennen and real-estate developer Robert Jemison Jr. had plans for a new kind of suburb - large estate lots, built around a community called Mountain Brook - in Blount County near Blount Springs, and that Drennen’s death ended those plans before they could start; this rests on local tradition rather than settled fact.
This project’s own Drennen family research is also relevant to the source behind Old Baltimore, which names a Drennen family, likely the same family, as later developers of a 1903-1920s coal-mining venture about six miles west of Blount Springs.
Appears in: The First Mountain Brook Was in Blount County, The Bee Line Highway & Prohibition Moonshine, and Blount Springs.