A white pine cradle sold out of Harrison Brothers Hardware in 1914 has a new occupant. Douglas Claude Martinson IV, born October 3, 2026, to Clay and Annabel Roth Martinson, is the fifth generation of one Huntsville family to sleep in it.
Clay Martinson, formally Douglas Claude Martinson III, is an attorney at Martinson & Beason, the North Side Square law firm his family has practiced at since 1937. He slept in the cradle as a baby. So did his father, Doug Martinson II, who leads the firm and serves as Madison County’s general conservator, and his grandfather, Doug Martinson Sr., who held that post before him.
“The cradle was purchased by L.H. Barnes at Harrison Brothers right in the square,” Clay Martinson told 256 Today. “The cradle is now over 100 years old and it is special that Douglas Claude Martinson IV gets to sleep in the cradle just as the three previous Douglas Claude Martinsons.”
The cradle came into the family on April 21, 1914, the day Clay Martinson’s great-grandmother, Annetta Martinson, was born. Her father, Claude Barnes, a butcher on what is now Andrew Jackson Way, bought it from his father, L.H. Barnes, one of the original clerks at Harrison Brothers. The family’s record of the sale puts the price at $10, paid 50 cents a week. The newest Martinson carries Claude Barnes’ name as his middle name.
Harrison Brothers, Alabama’s oldest operating hardware store, still stands on South Side Square, across the courthouse lawn from the Martinson & Beason office.
The Huntsville Times put the cradle on its front page in June 2002, when Clay Martinson’s younger brother, Reed, became the 37th child to use it.
Clay, then a young boy, is standing at the rail in the photo that ran with the story. The paper reported that Doug Martinson Sr. pieced together the cradle’s history from the hardware store’s ledger, and that relatives had shipped it between Huntsville, Birmingham, South Florida and Pennsylvania over the decades.
“It’s a very well-traveled cradle,” Roshelle Walker, Annetta Martinson’s sister, told the Times that year.
A list of every child who has slept in it is kept in a glass case that travels with the cradle. Douglas Martinson IV is the 41st.
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