There’s a Mountain Brook Store in Blount County today, a small country store that has nothing to do with the wealthy Birmingham suburb of the same name - except, according to local tradition, the name itself.
The connecting figure is Walter Melville “Mel” Drennen, mayor of Birmingham from 1899 to 1905. Drennen was born in 1851 in Arkadelphia, the son of a Blount and Walker County family, and he kept a real, substantial stake in west Blount long after he left for the city: he personally owned the Blount Springs resort at its peak, from 1900 to 1914. He 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 in 1926 ended those plans before they could start. Jemison, the story goes, took the idea and the name and built it instead where it stands today, in Jefferson County: Mountain Brook, incorporated in 1942, developed starting in 1929 as an estate-lot suburb centered on the Birmingham Country Club, and now one of the wealthiest cities in the country. That specific account - a planned Blount County location, not just a borrowed name - hasn’t been checked against a primary document (a prospectus, a period newspaper item) and rests on local tradition rather than settled fact. But the naming connection to a “Mountain Brook Store” in Blount County is itself an older, independently circulating claim, not something invented for this story, and the timeline holds up: Drennen died three years before Jemison’s Mountain Brook broke ground.
Related: Blount Springs, which Drennen owned during exactly this period; and Zelma Clyde Tidwell, Blount County’s Bridge Builder, the crew foreman behind this bridge itself. Also note: the developer behind the real Mountain Brook, Robert Jemison Jr. (1878-1974), shares his name with (and is actually the grandnephew of) an earlier Jemison - Robert Jemison Jr. (1802-1871), who ran the stagecoach line through Blount County decades before this Jemison was born.
Sources: Bhamwiki, “Mel Drennen”; Bhamwiki, “Mountain Brook”; Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Mountain Brook”; and local tradition on the Mountain Brook Store/Blount Springs naming connection, shared by Greg Caudle.