Walter Duncan Bellingrath

Though a native of Atlanta, Walter Bellingrath was raised in the small town of Castleberry, Alabama, where he got his start at the age of 17 with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. His first job was as a station manager and his duties included sending and receiving telegraph messages. His old telegraph key sits on his desk in the Bellingrath Home as a reminder of those simple beginnings with one of the South’s most generous benefactors.

In 1903, Walter and his older brother William heard about an opportunity to purchase the new franchise to sell bottled Coca-Cola in southern Alabama. The franchise territory stretched down to the Gulf Coast and when it was determined that they should split the territory, Walter took Mobile since, as he later joked, he liked to fish. The Mobile Coca-Cola Bottling Company became one of the most successful in the United States and Walter Bellingrath’s business interests stretched to owning the National Mosaic Tile Company, serving on the board of the First National Bank, owning a warehousing company and he was an original founder of Waterman Steamship Company of Mobile.

His interest in his adopted hometown led to his long association with the Mobile Chamber of Commerce. On two different occasions it was Walter Bellingrath who wrote a personal check to cover the entity’s annual financial shortfalls. He was a member of Central Presbyterian Church where he served as a deacon.

Walter Bellingrath married Bessie Mae Morse of Mobile in 1906. The couple had no children. After his wife’s death in 1943, Bellingrath dedicated the rest of his life to work on the Gardens she had worked so hard to create. “These Gardens were my wife’s dream,” he once said, “and I want to live to see that dream come true.”

In 1955, at his death at the age of 86, his estate had been converted over to the Bellingrath-Morse Foundation to oversee the operation of his beloved Gardens and to open his Home to the public. To this day, profits beyond those needed to operate Bellingrath Gardens and Home benefit Central Presbyterian Church, St. Francis Methodist Church and provide scholarships at Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama, Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee (formerly Southwestern University).

Co-founder, with his wife, of Bellingrath Gardens and Home in Mobile, Alabama.