McElwain Cemetery is one of the oldest landmarks in the Crestline neighborhood. Established around 1875 on Gladstone Avenue, it served as the burial ground for the workers and families of the Cahaba Iron Works — the blast furnace operation that gave this part of Shades Valley its first industrial community. Wallace S. McElwain, a New York machinist and foundryman, purchased over 800 acres in what is now Crestline in 1863 and built a furnace to make pig iron from ore mined on Red Mountain. That iron was hauled by oxcart to Montevallo and shipped by rail to the Confederate arsenal at Selma. The furnace was destroyed by Union cavalry in March 1865, rebuilt the following year, and operated until 1873. When the ironworks closed, the community didn’t leave. The families shifted to farming and dairy, and they continued to bury their dead on the hillside along Gladstone.
The cemetery holds the graves of Civil War veterans, ironworks laborers, local artisans, and the farming families who kept the McElwain community alive through Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century. Among the most compelling stories here is that of Jack and Annie O’Hara, a husband and wife who died just one week apart in 1915. Their graves went unmarked, and over the decades were literally paved over as Gladstone Avenue was graded and improved. Local historian Mrs. Mary Godwin eventually discovered the O’Hara burials beneath the road surface — a reminder that this cemetery’s original boundaries extended further than its current fences suggest.
On May 23, 2024, McElwain Cemetery was officially listed on the Alabama Historic Cemetery Register by the Alabama Historical Commission — a designation recognizing its age, historical significance, and connection to the industrial founding of this area. The cemetery sits today tightly enclosed by homes and townhouses along Gladstone Avenue, quietly holding a century and a half of Crestline’s earliest history in a space most neighbors drive past without a second thought. Alongside the Cummings-Eastis House and the remnants of the Irondale Furnace nearby, it is one of the few physical links to the community that Wallace McElwain built on the slopes of Red Mountain — and one of the few places where the people who built this neighborhood are still present, marked and unmarked, under the oaks on Gladstone.
Sources: Barefield, Marilyn Davis. A History of Mountain Brook, Alabama & Incidentally of Shades Valley. Alabama Historic Cemetery Register nomination. Baker, Joe William. A Time When… (1993).
Crestline Neighborhood Association · Local History Series