When Sam Hendrix retired from Auburn University in 2013 after a career mostly in public relations and development, he received some sage advice from people he had worked with at the veterinary school.

“They told me, ‘You need to find something to stay busy,’” he recalls.

Hendrix took those words to heart and, in fairly short order, he had written the history of his church, Auburn Church of Christ, and a biography of founding Veterinary Medicine Dean Charles Allen Cary.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Hendrix’s love for and work on Auburn history. For five years, he has been working on his latest book, the encyclopedic “Auburn: A History in Street Names.”

“I had started taking notes about street names in Auburn, thinking I’d try to do something with it,” Hendrix says. “There’s so much interesting history in Auburn, I thought that would be fun to put together.”

Hendrix started with a street map that he found in a doughnut shop in Auburn.

“It was the index to that street map that I used to begin my manuscript,” he says. “I started a Word document and I typed in, single-space, the 450 street names alphabetically. I’d go back to that Word document and add information as I got it. That 10- or 11-page Word document grew to 700 pages.”

The final result is 735 pages and about 400 street names, along with 67 stand-alone stories about people and events in Auburn history.

“When you put it all together, you really do have a history of the community, told in a street-by-street way,” says Hendrix, who lives in Auburn with his wife, Mary Ellen. “I think of it as a connect-the-dots history.”

The book includes well-known street names – and Auburn names – such as Thach, Burton and Petrie, but then there are streets, and stories, that are not as well-known.

Sam Hendrix and his wife, Mary Ellen, live in Auburn. (contributed)

“I became really familiar with the street names and the movers and shakers of Auburn,” Hendrix says. “But I was interested in including not only the so-called important people of Auburn, but also the regular, everyday people that things happened to.”

A couple of Hendrix’s favorites:

• Berkeley Avenue, which runs between East University to Loftin Drive, is pronounced like basketball star Charles Barkley’s last name but about as far away from basketball as you can get when it comes to its provenance. Turns out the wife of Alton Scott Little named it when the family – Alton, Betty and little Lucy – were asked to come up with a name for their street. Betty drew the name from her and Alton’s favorite song, the World War II-era “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”
• Payne Street, a road just off of Auburn University’s campus, was the setting for some horticulture revenge in the 1970s. “A fellow rented a small house on Payne Street, and he put in some beautiful shrubs and small trees, and by the spring, he had the best-looking yard on Payne Street,” Hendrix says. So good-looking that his landlords went up on the rent, and he had to move. But before he left, he restored the house to its former non-glory. “He dug up as many of the plants and shrubs as he could and hauled them away,” Hendrix says.

Proceeds from book sales will fund an endowment at Auburn University to provide academic camp scholarships for Auburn Youth Programs. The ‘camperships,’ which cover costs of registration, on-campus lodging and meals, provide the opportunity for local youth to attend week-long academic summer camps at Auburn University. Learn more about the book and purchase a copy here.