Mayor of Birmingham from 1899 to 1905. Born in 1859 in Arkadelphia, Cullman County, the son of Rev. Walter Blythe Drennen (1817-1871) and Matilda Harden Cornwell Drennen, 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.
In September 1914, Drennen was among twenty citizens who signed a letter to the Birmingham Age-Herald opposing a longer proposed highway route through Oneonta and Blountsville, and called the public meeting at Blount Springs that the state highway engineer actually attended. Seven years later, as owner of Blount Springs, he personally granted the state highway commission right-of-way through Blount County along the old L&N roadbed - the act that completed the Bee-Line Highway’s connection between Nashville and Orlando.
Appears in: The First Mountain Brook Was in Blount County, The Bee Line Highway & Prohibition Moonshine, and Blount Springs.
His family: his father, Rev. Walter Blythe Drennen (1817-1871), is buried at Harmony Baptist Church Cemetery at Sloan, in west Blount County - the Drennens were an established family in the western part of the county a generation before Blount Springs. Mel was one of nine children. His brother John Wesley “Wes” Drennen married Margaret Leona “Tump” Hanby, of the Hanby family behind Hanby Mill, connecting the two families directly.