Chapter One
Dr. Carl Grote Sr.
April 20, 1887 — February 14, 1964
In the winter of 1916, people were dying in Huntsville, Alabama.
Not all at once, not in some dramatic moment that the newspapers would later call a catastrophe. They were dying the slow, miserable way that people died in small Southern cities at the turn of a century that had not yet learned how to keep its water clean. Typhoid fever. It came every season, sometimes worse, sometimes not quite as bad, but always there — a background hum of sickness that parents had simply come to accept as part of life in a city that drew its drinking water from Big Spring, the very landmark the town had been built around.
The city’s plumbing told the whole story. Open privies and outhouses sat over rock crevices behind the old market house, and those rock crevices ran, unseen, directly to the same underground aquifer that fed Big Spring. Every time it rained hard enough, Huntsville was essentially drinking from its own waste. The people of the city did not know this. Their doctors suspected it. Their city fathers preferred not to look too closely.
In 1916, the Alabama State Health Department could no longer ignore the appeals coming out of Madison County. They sent a young physician named Dr. Carl August Grote to investigate. He was twenty-nine years old, born in Greensboro in Hale County, and already had a reputation as the kind of doctor who did not sit still behind a desk. He had been serving as Walker County’s public health officer — the first county-level public health official in the state of Alabama — and he had spent two years knee-deep in the worst of what the industrial South could produce: pellagra.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Red Death
Pellagra was a disease of poverty dressed up to look like something else. Its victims suffered dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and, if nothing was done, death. Physicians across the South were baffled by it. Some blamed racial heredity. Some blamed bad corn. The national medical establishment, following the Thompson-McFadden Commission’s 1912 study, had concluded it was infectious — spread person to person, like a cold. They were wrong, but they had the prestige and the published papers, and wrong ideas with good credentials have a way of surviving longer than they should.
Dr. Joseph Goldberger of the U.S. Public Health Service had begun to suspect the truth — that pellagra was a nutritional deficiency, not an infectious disease — but in 1916, Goldberger had only studied the disease in controlled environments: prisons and orphanages, places where he could manage the variables. He had not yet taken his work into actual communities, into the places where people actually lived and worked and ate.
Carl Grote had.
In Walker County’s mining camps, Grote conducted the first on-site field study of pellagra in a real community setting. What he found confirmed three things that the medical establishment did not want to hear: the disease had nothing to do with race or heredity; it tracked directly with income — the poorer the family, the higher the rate; and diet appeared to be the cause and the cure. He published his findings in 1916 in the Alabama state medical journal. Goldberger’s landmark mill village studies, which would eventually settle the question for the national medical community, would not appear until 1920 — four years later.
Grote’s work should have made him famous. It did not. Published once, in a state journal with limited circulation, it was quietly forgotten, overtaken by the larger noise of a larger man’s larger reputation. History has a way of doing that to the people who got there first but didn’t have the right address.
What Grote took from Walker County was not fame. It was certainty. He knew what he was looking at when he saw suffering, and he knew how to follow it to its source.
✦ ✦ ✦
On His Hands and Knees
When Dr. Grote arrived in Huntsville in 1916 to investigate the typhoid epidemic, he did what Carl Grote always did: he went to look at the thing itself.
The water system told the story, but only if you were willing to get underneath it. Open toilets had been built over rock crevices behind the old market house — at the site where the Twickenham Hotel would later stand — and those crevices ran directly into the underground formation that fed Big Spring. It was not a complicated mystery once you got close enough to see it. The problem was that most men in positions of authority were not inclined to get that close.
Grote went down into the caverns beneath the courthouse square on his hands and knees. In the dark, in spaces not meant for a grown man, he crawled through Huntsville’s underground water system until he found what he was looking for. He came back out with the answer. The contamination was sewage, the source was the privies, and the fix was chlorination.
His son, Dr. Carl Grote Jr., would describe it decades later with the understatement that ran in the family: his father had simply gone to find the problem, and he found it. The modest summary, the younger Grote acknowledged, did not quite capture what it meant to crawl through a city’s underground waterworks to save its people from themselves.
Mayor Earle Smith authorized the work. Crews blasted rock at depths of ten and twelve feet to install iron sewers. The first chlorine plant went in. In 1917 there were 120 documented cases of typhoid fever in Huntsville. The year after the chlorine plant was operating properly, the epidemic that had haunted the city for generations was over.
The people of Huntsville did not forget. There was, according to the historical record, a groundswell of support for this young physician to stay. Two years after his investigation, in 1918, Dr. Carl Grote packed his belongings in Jasper and made Huntsville his permanent home, becoming Madison County’s first public health officer.
He was thirty-one years old. He would spend the rest of his life there. He would be buried there. And a street in the mill village neighborhood where many of his patients lived — a street in the place that would come to be called Huntsville Park — would eventually carry the first letter of his name.
✦ ✦ ✦
The World Dr. Grote Walked Into
To understand where Carl Grote was practicing medicine, it helps to understand what Huntsville looked like in 1918 — specifically, the part of it that most needed a doctor.
On July 4, 1899, ground had been broken in West Huntsville for a new cotton spinning mill. The Merrimack Manufacturing Company of Lowell, Massachusetts had spent years looking for the right location to bring Northern capital to Southern labor, and a local businessman named Tracy Pratt had finally convinced them that Huntsville was their place. The first mill began operation on July 9, 1900. A second mill followed in 1903. By 1904, the complex had 90,000 spindles and 2,900 looms, one of the largest operations in the South.
To get workers, the mill needed to offer housing. It built a village — first sixty houses, then more, eventually close to three hundred — a grid of modest duplexes laid out along streets that followed the same pattern as the Merrimack mill village back in Massachusetts, as if the company had simply picked up a New England town plan and set it down in Alabama red clay. The houses were not elegant. They were built to a few basic types: single-story shotgun duplexes, two-story I-houses, hipped-roof doubles with shed-roofed porches. They were built by the mill, owned by the mill, and rented to workers whose lives, from the moment they moved in, belonged in almost every meaningful way to the mill.
In 1913, the Merrimack Mill Company decided its workers needed a company store. The store occupied a building that also served as a classroom for village children. By 1920 it had expanded into a 25,000-square-foot brick building with a gymnasium, a theater, community rooms, and the store at its center. The mill provided housing, schooling, medical care, entertainment, and groceries — all within the mill’s own perimeter, all on the mill’s own terms.
Workers who violated mill rules could be evicted from their homes. Workers who fell behind at the company store — where credit was easy and the books were kept by the store — could find themselves carrying a balance that never quite went to zero, a quiet guarantee that they would return for the next shift, and the shift after that. Children stood on boxes to reach the machinery. In December 1913, a photographer named Lewis Hine came through Huntsville on assignment for the National Child Labor Committee. His photographs of young workers at the Merrimack Mill are today in the Library of Congress. The children in them are not smiling.
This was the world of Carl Grote’s patients.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Year Everything Hit at Once
The same year Grote arrived to stay — 1918 — Huntsville was hit by something far worse than typhoid.
In late September 1918, the first cases of Spanish influenza were reported in Huntsville. They were the first cases in the state of Alabama. Dr. C. A. Grote, health officer of Madison County, reported eleven cases in the northern part of the county to the State Board of Health. He noted that the first case had been imported from Philadelphia the previous week.
Within days it was out of control.
By October 5th, more than 1,100 cases had been counted in Huntsville, with seven deaths in the previous twenty-four hours alone. The city closed schools, churches, theaters, and picture shows. Businesses were ordered to curtail their hours. The postal service was crippled. The Alabama Power Company could not find enough workers to keep the lights on. And then, in a moment that crystallized exactly what Carl Grote was up against, a desperate telegram went out from Huntsville to the state capital in Montgomery: every druggist, every physician, and every prescription clerk in the city except one had been struck down by the disease. The city had run out of doctors.
All of them, that is, except one.
The historical record does not say explicitly that Carl Grote was the last doctor standing in Huntsville in October 1918. But someone was. Someone kept working. Someone was still filing reports with the State Board of Health while his colleagues lay sick in their own beds. Across the country that fall, an estimated 675,000 Americans would die — more than in the entire World War that was simultaneously consuming the continent of Europe. In Huntsville alone, nearly 400 people would die from the flu in less than four months.
Carl Grote worked through it.
The influenza pandemic of 1918 did not end cleanly. It receded, came back, receded again. Strains of it circulated through the following years, diminished but not gone, finding the vulnerable in the corners of communities that thought the worst was over. In mill districts and farming hollows and small city neighborhoods across the South, children who had survived 1918 were still dying from respiratory illness in the years that followed. The flu had a long memory.
It would not be the last time the Oldfield family of Huntsville Park learned that lesson.
✦ ✦ ✦
Building Something That Would Last
By the mid-1920s, Dr. Grote had turned his attention to what Huntsville did not have and needed badly: a real hospital.
Huntsville had been trying to maintain a proper medical facility since 1895, when a group of civic-minded women founded a small infirmary with seven beds and two nurses in a wood-frame house on Mill Street. It had moved. It had grown, modestly. But by the 1920s, it was not enough for a city and a mill district that were both growing, both generating the kind of industrial injury and illness that cotton spinning and poverty reliably produce.
In 1925, Dr. Carl Grote Sr. chaired the committee to raise funds for a new hospital. What followed was described, even then, as an outpouring of public sentiment. Most of the money came from private donations — from the people of Huntsville and the surrounding county, the mill workers and merchants and farmers who had, in many cases, been treated by Grote themselves or knew someone who had. The land was donated by a man named Harry Rhett Sr. The campaign raised $200,000.
In 1926, Huntsville Hospital opened — the first modern hospital in the Tennessee Valley. The first baby was delivered there on June 11, 1926. The name had officially changed from the Huntsville Infirmary to Huntsville Hospital. It was, in his son’s memorable phrase, Carl Grote’s hobby. He practiced medicine for fun, the younger Grote would say. The hospital was what he built for keeps.
He would be known, in time, as the patriarch of Huntsville Hospital.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Mill Village, the Nursery, and the Distance Between Them
While Carl Grote was keeping the people of West Huntsville alive, two families were putting down roots in the same red Alabama soil, on opposite ends of the city, in two different versions of the same American story.
On the northeast side of town, past the old Moores Mill Road, a man named Joseph Wheeler Limbaugh — Papa Joe — worked as caretaker of Chase Nursery, one of the largest nursery operations in the southeastern United States. The nursery had been founded in 1882 by a man from Maine named Henry Bellows Chase, who had traveled through the area by rail, noticed that the land east of Monte Sano Mountain was exactly right for growing things, and stayed. By the time Papa Joe walked its rows, Chase Nursery covered more than 1,500 acres. It shipped flowers and live plants to customers across the eastern United States in refrigerated railway cars that departed from its own company siding on the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway.
Chase Nursery was, in its way, another version of what Merrimack Mill had built on the other side of town: a company town with a store, an infirmary, and a small village of worker housing on the south side of the tracks. The blueprint was the same across the industrial South — you owned the land, you built the houses, you ran the store, and the workers who came to work for you came to live inside a world you had made. Papa Joe and his family lived in that world, on Moores Mill Road NE, in a house that would one day be replaced by an Advance Auto Parts store. The community was so shaped by the Chase family’s presence that the entire northeast quarter of modern Huntsville still carries the name: Chase. Chase Gardens. The Chase area. Streets and neighborhoods named for a man from Maine who had come south to grow flowers.
Papa Joe’s son, Marcus David Limbaugh, grew up among the nursery’s rows. He learned the work his father did — careful, patient work, the kind that unfolds over seasons rather than days. He would grow up to become, in the words of a son who worshipped him, the George Bailey of Huntsville, Alabama. But that is Chapter Three.
✦ ✦ ✦
On the west side of town, in the mill village that would one day be called Huntsville Park, a family named Oldfield had come to live in the mill’s shadow. Charles Newton Oldfield — Papa Charlie to his grandchildren — was born in 1895 and would serve in the United States Army in the first World War before settling into the life of a mill district man. His wife was Ida McMurtrie, and together they would raise their children in the modest houses of Huntsville Park, on the same streets that Carl Grote’s patients walked.
Their second child was a boy named Harold Lloyd Oldfield. The family called him Buddy.
Buddy was born on November 18, 1936. He was a little boy growing up in a neighborhood where screen doors were never locked and children ran between yards without asking permission. He had an older brother, Charles. He would eventually have a younger sister.
On June 20, 1939, that younger sister arrived. Her name was Daisy Ann Oldfield. The family called her Ann.
Buddy was two years and seven months old the day his little sister was born. He would have been the first one to the cradle. He would have been the one peering over the edge to see what all the fuss was about.
He had two years and two days left to live.
On June 20, 1941 — Ann’s second birthday — Harold Lloyd “Buddy” Oldfield died. He was four years old. The cause, his mother would later tell the family, was the flu.
He is buried at Fowlkes Cemetery in Monrovia, Madison County, Alabama. His headstone reads:
H. L. (Buddy) Oldfield
Nov. 18, 1936 — June 20, 1941
The influenza that Carl Grote had fought in 1918 — the pandemic that had killed nearly four hundred people in Huntsville in four months, that had sent desperate telegrams to Montgomery and closed every church and school and theater in the city — had not finished with Huntsville Park. It had simply waited. It found Buddy Oldfield in the summer of 1941, on his little sister’s birthday, and it took him.
Ann Oldfield would celebrate her birthday every year for the rest of her life — seventy-eight more of them, birthday cakes and candles and the people she loved gathered around her. She chose joy. Every June 20th, she chose joy. What she carried beneath it, she carried quietly, the way the women of Huntsville Park had always carried the things that could not be fixed.
She never stopped celebrating. She never stopped remembering.
✦ ✦ ✦
What the Lintheads Called Themselves
The mill workers had a name for themselves, and they used it without shame: Lintheads. It came from the cotton lint that clung to their hair and clothes after a shift, the white fibers that floated in the air of the weaving room and settled on every surface. If you worked in a cotton mill, you were a Linthead, and the word carried in it the whole compressed history of what it meant to live your life in service to someone else’s machinery.
They were not, on the whole, people who had chosen the mill. They were people who had come from somewhere harder — from tenant farms, from worked-out hill country, from places where the alternative to the mill was worse than the mill. The Merrimack Manufacturing Company had known this when it built its village. It recruited workers from outlying areas with the promise of housing, and the housing delivered on that promise: a roof, a door, a yard. The company store delivered groceries. The mill hospital delivered medical care. The school delivered education. Everything a family needed, the mill provided — and everything a family owed, the mill collected.
On July 16, 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, more than four thousand Huntsville mill workers walked off their jobs. It was the largest labor action in the history of the South, the opening act of a strike that would eventually spread from Alabama to Maine and involve hundreds of thousands of workers across the national textile industry. The Merrimack workers sang as they walked: We are twelve hundred strong, and the strike is still on. They organized armed guards at the mill gates. They sent flying squadrons to other mills.
The most dramatic moment came on August 5th, when a group of men took John Dean — the veteran United Textile Workers organizer who had made Huntsville the base of operations for the entire Southern campaign — from his room at the Russell Erskine Hotel. They drove him to Fayetteville, Tennessee, and told him not to come back. Jim Conner, commander of the state’s American Legion, was indicted for the kidnapping. The case was eventually dropped. Within hours of his abduction, Dean had returned to Huntsville with an escort of forty mill workers.
The strike failed. When it was over, the workers went back to their machines without the wage increases, without the thirty-hour week, without the recognition they had walked out to demand. The South had ways. It always had. The mill owners had the police, the courts, the relief administrators, and the long memory of a region that had never been comfortable with organized labor. The workers had courage and a song. Courage and a song were not enough.
Dr. Carl Grote treated them when they were sick, no matter which side of the mill gate they had been standing on.
✦ ✦ ✦
A Street With His Initial
After the war, after Lowenstein and Company of New York purchased the mill in 1946 and renamed it Huntsville Manufacturing Company, after the village lost its mill identity and acquired a municipal one — after all of that — the neighborhood that had once been the Merrimack Mill Village became Huntsville Park.
In 1949, the new owners began selling the houses back to the workers who had lived in them. A three-room house went for $1,725. The largest, twelve rooms, cost $4,900. Ten percent down, monthly payments. The water and sewer systems were deeded to the city. On November 30, 1951, Joe Bradley School was formally handed over to the Madison County school system. The streets were paved for the first time.
The streets already had names. Someone, at some point, had named them for the people who had shaped the life of the village. There was Clopton Street, named for Anne Bradshaw Clopton, a teacher at Joe Bradley School. There was DuBose Street, for E.F. DuBose, the principal who ran the school from 1921 to 1967. There was Emm Ell Street — M.L., for M. Lowenstein, the company that had bought the mill and freed the workers from the company-town arrangements of the original owners.
And there was G Street.
G for Grote.
A single letter, on a street in a neighborhood where the people had not always had enough to eat, where children had stood on boxes to reach the machinery, where four thousand workers had once sung about being twelve hundred strong. A letter for a doctor who had crawled through the underground on his hands and knees to save the city’s water, who had worked through a pandemic that killed nearly everyone around him, who had raised the money and built the hospital, who had looked after the Lintheads and the nursery workers and every family in between.
G Street. It is still there.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Son Who Followed
Dr. Carl Grote Jr. was born in 1928 in Huntsville, grew up watching his father work, went to Vanderbilt University for his medical degree, and came home in 1958 — two years before the boy this book is about was born — to practice medicine alongside his father.
For six years they practiced together, until the elder Grote died on Valentine’s Day, 1964, at the age of seventy-six, and was laid in the ground at Maple Hill Cemetery, in the city he had saved.
Carl Grote Jr. carried on. He practiced family medicine until 1999. After he retired, he volunteered at the Community Free Clinic and went on international medical mission trips. He became, in the words of those who knew him, the most generous physician donor in Huntsville Hospital Foundation history. The Outstanding Physician Advocate Award at Huntsville Hospital was eventually named for him. He died in December 2021 at the age of ninety-three, from Parkinson’s disease, having never really stopped working.
He was, for the duration of a childhood and a young manhood and through the worst medical crisis a family can face, the Limbaugh family’s doctor.
In the summer of 1972, when Marcus David Limbaugh was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of thirty-five, it was Carl Grote Jr. who made the call. He had known Marcus since before Marcus’s son was old enough to walk. He knew the family. He had been there for the births, the fevers, the ordinary maintenance of ordinary lives.
He delivered the news that would change everything.
But that is also Chapter Three.
✦ ✦ ✦
Before the Story Begins
On January 3, 1960, a boy was born at Huntsville Hospital — the hospital that Carl Grote Sr. had raised the money to build, the hospital where Carl Grote Jr. now practiced alongside his aging father.
His name was David. His mother was Ann Oldfield, daughter of the mill district, sister of a little boy named Buddy who had died on her second birthday and whose name she carried quietly through every June 20th that followed. His father was Marcus Limbaugh, son of the man who cared for Chase Nursery’s fifteen hundred acres. He weighed what newborns weigh, and cried the way newborns cry, and had no way of knowing any of what had come before him: the typhoid in the water, the flu that killed four hundred people in four months, the cotton lint in the air, the strike that failed, the hospital built on private donations, the street with a single letter for its name, the little boy in the ground at Fowlkes Cemetery whose headstone bore a nickname instead of a name because that was how his family knew him.
He only knew that he was here.
The world that had made him — the world of mill villages and nursery rows, of company stores and chlorinated water, of a doctor who crawled through the dark to save a city and another who would one day deliver the worst news a family ever receives — that world was the water he had been born into.
It was January 3, 1960.
Dr. Carl Grote Sr. — the man who crawled through the dark to save a city, who raised the money and built the hospital, who practiced medicine for the love of it and left his initial on a street in a mill village neighborhood — would be the first of many famous, life-changing, kind, and extraordinary people that David Limbaugh would be blessed to meet.
Then he got to meet his Mom.