Portait of Alabama Power Company founder James Mitchell by Danish-born American Impressionist John Christen Johansen. (1876-1944).
Portait of Alabama Power Company founder James Mitchell by Danish-born American Impressionist John Christen Johansen. (1876-1944).


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Summer 2006, Issue 81

Article Abstracts and Supplements

•Empowering Alabama: The James Mitchell Story
•Toumlin & Hitchcock, Pioneering Jurists of the Alabama Frontier
•Alabama's Vine and Olive Colony: Myth and Fact
•From Tuskegee to Angkor: The Odyssey of Lucille Douglass
 •Departments



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Empowering Alabama: The James Mitchell Story
By Leah Rawls Atkins

Engineer and entrepreneur James Mitchell was passionate about the potential of hydroelectric power. Chronicled here are his efforts to bring reliable electricity to Alabama by exploiting the state’s expansive river system. Mitchell invested much of his career and a substantial portion of his own capital to build hydroelectric dams that would support the new Alabama Power Company. Not terribly interested in fiscal profit, Mitchell succeeded in his greater goal: to leave a legacy—“A new Alabama and a new South.”


Additional Information
Developed for the Service of Alabama: The Centennial History of the Alabama Power Company and Thomas W. Martin, The Story of Electricity in Alabama.


About the Author
Leah Rawls Atkins, director emeritus of the Auburn University Center for the Arts & Humanities, holds a Ph.D. from Auburn University and taught history for almost three decades at Auburn and Samford Universities. She is a co-author of the award-winning Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, which was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1994. She retired in 1995, and since then has written a biography of John M. Harbert III, a corporate history of Brasfield & Gorrie, and is currently completing the centennial history of the Alabama Power Company, which will be published in late 2006. She lives in Birmingham.
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This 1913 construction photograph of the Lock 12 dam site shows the downstream side of the powerhouse and dam. It was the largest construction project to that time in the state of Alabama. The Coosa dam was more than forty-five feet higher than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam and two lock chambers at Lock 17 on the Black Warrior River. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
James Mitchell often visited the Lock 12 site on the Coosa River during construction of what would become Lay Dam. On April 18, 1913, Mitchell rode in a bucket to get a high view of the site. From left to right, James Mitchell, W.W. Freeman (general manager of Alabama Power), and power company engineers Oscar G. Thurlow and Eugene A. Yates. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
Liner and Shaft for Unit 4, Lock 12. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
The large turbine in the powerhouse at Lock 12 would spin with falling water, turn the shaft connected to the generator, and electricity would flow through transmission lines to substations, eventually distributing power to homes and industries. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
This map reveals electrical transmission in the state of Alabama in 1915. Green lines represent 22,000-volt and 44,000-volt lines in service and red lines represent the 110,000-volt lines bringing electricity from the Lock 12 Dam. The dark blue lines were proposed transmission lines. Alabama Power Company supplied electricity to Decatur, Huntsville, and Guntersville by small steam plants, but in a few years, these cities were connected to the hydroelectricity from the Coosa River and the small hydroelectric plant at Jackson Shoals. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
Construction of Mitchell Dam in 1922. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
Construction of Mitchell Dam in 1922. ( Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
When James Mitchell came to Alabama in 1911, he visited Cherokee Bluffs on the Tallapoosa River south of Dadeville and proclaimed it the finest dam site he had ever seen. Mitchell did not live to see his company construct a dam at the bluffs. This dam, completed in 1926, was 168 feet high ad was named for the man who succeeded Mitchell as president of Alabama Power, Thomas W. Martin. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
Jackson Shoals. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
The 106-foot Mitchell Dam was constructed on the Coosa River at Duncan’s Riffle in 1921. Like all Alabama Power Company dams on the Coosa River, it includes a location where the U.S. Corps of Engineers can construct a lock should the federal government ever appropriate funds to open the entire river to navigation. (Courtesy Alabama Power Company.)
James Mitchell, a Massachusetts-raised engineer who visited Alabama in 1911, immediately recognized the hydroelectric potential of Alabama’s rivers. (Courtesy the James Mitchell Family.)
James Mitchell’s wife, Carolyn, lived in London during World War I while her husband was developing Alabama Power Company. But before his death in 1920, she was looking at homes in Birmingham. (Courtesy the James Mitchell Family.)
Toulmin & Hitchcock, Pioneering Jurists of the Alabama Frontier
By Philip Beidler

Amid the freewheeling and often lawless atmosphere of Alabama’s territorial and early statehood eras, Harry Toulmin and Henry Hitchcock authored two landmark legal volumes. Toulmin, the son of a noted theologian and a disciple of Dr. Joseph Priestly, wrote A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama, an important legal compendium that would help codify the laws and democratize the state legal system. Henry Hitchcock, a descendent of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, authored Alabama Justice of the Peace, a guidebook and courts manual that soon became the standard text for judicial functionaries on the outposts of the frontier.


Additional Information
A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama by Harry Toulmin

Alabama Justice of the Peace by Henry Hitchcock

Ethan Allen Homestead History
http://www.ethanallenhomestead.org/history/index.htm

Alabama Supreme Court & State Law Library
alalinc.net/library/

Alabama Department of Archives & History Bio of Henry Hitchcock
archives.state.al.us/conoff/hitchcoc.html

Harry Toulmin’s descendent, Janie DeNeefe, wrote this article entitled “Lessons taught by ancestor still relevant to citizens today” for the Huntsville Times, April 30, 2006.

Another descendent, Llewellyn M. Toulmin, wrote this article entitled “Ancestral Journey” for the Mobile Register March 19, 2006.
About the Author
Philip Beidler is a professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he has taught American literature since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1974. His publications over the years in Alabama Heritage include essays on Caroline Lee Hentz, Johnny Mack Brown, and Alabama soldiers in the Vietnam War and the American Civil War. His most recent book is Late Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam (2004). He has just completed a new set of linked essays on American wars and American peace, Son of the Empire.


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 With two landmark legal volumes, Harry Toulmin (A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama) and Henry Hitchcock (Alabama Justice of the Peace) sought to codify the laws of the nascent state of Alabama. (Books courtesy the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library, the University of Alabama. Photograph by Ricky Yanaura.)
While living in the Tombigbee District of the Mississippi, Harry Toulmin served as superior court judge, arrested Aaron Burr, and traveled to Huntsville to take an active role in the statehood convention. (Courtesy the University of South Alabama Archives.)
The home of Harry Toulmin’s son, built ca. 1828–1829, now houses Alumni Hall on the campus of the University of South Alabama. (Courtesy the University of South Alabama Archives.)
Before penning his Alabama Justice of the Peace, Henry Hitchcock served as the first secretary of the Alabama Territory and served as one of two Washington County representatives to the state’s constitutional convention. (Courtesy the University of South Alabama Archives.)
A cartoon of Simon Suggs, the eponymous hero of Johnson Jones Hooper’s Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, whose raffish escapades typified the unruly Alabama frontier. (From Johnson Jones Hooper’s Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs. Courtesy the University of Alabama Press.)
Many of Washington Irving’s tales sardonically caricatured the “early attempts at make-it-as-you go law and order” that were manifest in the lives and careers of Toulmin and Hitchcock. (Courtesy the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)
Henry Hitchcock counted among his ancestors the Revolutionary War Hero Ethan Allen, whose work with the Onion River Company endowed Hitchcock’s mother with a considerable fortune. (Courtesy the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)
Alabama's Vine and Olive Colony: Myth and Fact
By Rafe Blaufarb

In the legend of the Vine and Olive Colony, a group of French military aristocrats fled to Alabama in 1817 after their Emperor Napoleon was deposed, and tried to cultivate grape vines and olive trees while maintaining their lavish lifestyle in Marengo County. In reality, most of the settlers were refugees from the French Caribbean island of St. Domingue where a bloody slave rebellion had left thousands dead. Congress approved a bill that gave the French settlers ninety-two thousand acres of recently conquered Creek and Choctaw territory before the lands were offered to the general public. Although bombarded with criticism over this generous “gift,” Congress created the land grant as part of a strategy to solidify the United States’ hold on the Gulf Coast by populating the area. A prime location at the juncture of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers—navigable rivers that flowed into Mobile Bay—also made the colony important. The struggle for basic survival overshadowed attempts to grow grape vines and olive trees, and by 1831 the colonists were released from obligations to plant the area with vines and olives. Although not a success in viticulture, the Vine and Olive Colony did make a lasting impact on future westward expansion. Congress would never again make a similar grant, so expansion had to be carried out in a more individualistic way.


Additional Information
Marengo County Historical Markers
archives.state.al.us/markers/imarengo.html

French consular reports on the association of French emigrants: The organization of the vine and olive colony findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_qa3880/is_200304/ai_n9172989

Pickett’s History of Alabama, Vine and Olive chapter:
homepages.rootsweb.com/~cmamcrk4/pkt45.html

Charles Lallemand info, Texas Handbook
tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/LL/fla14.html

History of Demopolis
demopolischamber.com/history.htm

UA Press page for Bonapartists in the Borderlands
uapress.ua.edu/NewSearch2.cfm?id=131998

Link to Amazon page
amazon.com/gp/product/0817314873/ref=sr_11_1/002-0974041-1709628?ie=UTF8


About the Author
Rafe Blaufarb, Associate Professor at Auburn University, is a specialist in French history, 1530–1830, with thematic interests in military history, the history of the state, and the Age of Revolution in the Atlantic world. He received his B.A. from Amherst College in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1996. His first book, The French Army, 1750 – 1820: Careers, Talent, Merit ( Manchester, 2002), treats the meritocratic transformation of the French military profession across the revolutionary period. His second book, Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815 – 1835, on the French settlement in territorial Alabama known as the Vine and Olive Colony, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2006. His current research is on state centralization, taxation, and social conflict in early modern France, 1530–1789 and on the impact of Latin American independence in the broader Atlantic world.


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 This wallpaper measures approximately twenty-two feet wide by six feet seven inches high and was hand painted in the time period 1818 to 1825 by an unknown French artist. General Lefebvre Desnouettes are General Charles Lallemand are depicted in various places on the mural along with agricultural scenes of a mythic Aigleville. The reality was much less pastoral. (Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.)
This wallpaper probably hung in a chateau in Dijon, France for many years before making its way to Alabama. This section measures approximately twenty feet four inches wide by six feet seven inches high. General Lefebvre Desnouettes and General Charles Lallemand are shown directing the preparation of land for the Vine and Olive Colony. (Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama.)
This envelope was sent by Jacques Lajonie from Greensboro, Alabama, to Gensac, the Lajonie’s birthplace in Gironde, France. Lajonie’s letters home provide valuable information about the daily life of the Vine and Olive colony. Lajonie left Alabama in 1829 and spent the rest of his life in local politics and winegrowing. (Courtesy Eric Saguera.)
This envelope was sent by Jacques Lajonie from Greensboro, Alabama, to Gensac, the Lajonie’s birthplace in Gironde, France. Lajonie’s letters home provide valuable information about the daily life of the Vine and Olive colony. Lajonie left Alabama in 1829 and spent the rest of his life in local politics and winegrowing. (Courtesy Eric Saguera.)
From Tuskegee to Angkor: The Odyssey of Lucille Douglass
By Stephen Goldfarb

In an era when women were expected to be dainty, passive, and entertaining, Lucille Douglass was an exception. Born into the genteel poverty of Tuskegee, Alabama in 1878, Douglass learned the foundations of visual art from her mother and yearned for travel. She graduated college with an art degree at the age of seventeen, and soon moved to Birmingham, where she lived alone for several years as both an artist and art teacher in a loft above the city. There she banded with other female artists to found the Birmingham Art Club—a foundation that still exists today. In 1909 Douglass turned her childhood dreams of travel into a European odyssey of artistic training, studying with masters like Rene Menard, Lucien Simon, and Alexander Robinson. She spent the rest of her life trotting the globe, working her way from Paris to Shanghai, to Angkor–even to parts of Africa. Everywhere she went, Douglass preserved her encounters as works of art. Through her paintings, etchings, and pastel drawings, she captured the exotic, and made it accessible to those not privileged enough to experience it firsthand.


Additional Information
The longest and most complete account of Douglass’s life and career can be found in Vicki Leigh Ingham, Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham, 1890–1950 (Birmingham Historical Society, 2004). An episode in Douglass’s career not dealt with in this article can be found in Catherine MacKenzie, “Florence Wheelock Ayscough’s Niger Reef Tea House,” Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’Histoire de l’Art Canadien, 23 (2002), 34-62. The Birmingham Museum of Art has extensive holdings of Douglass’s art, mostly from before World War I (and a few papers) and the Department of Archives and Manuscripts of the Birmingham Public Library has extensive holdings of Douglass’s papers.

For possible further study, the author would like to hear from anyone who owns any of Miss Douglass’s papers or art works, especially her paintings. He can be reached at sgold2025@yahoo.com.


About the Author
Stephen J. Goldfarb holds a Ph.D. in the history of science and technology from Case Western Reserve University. He retired from the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library in 2003. His article on the Mobile etcher/artist Marian Acker Macpherson appeared in Alabama Heritage, # 73, Summer 2004. He has also written on New Deal art (primarily post office murals) in Georgia.


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 This tinted photograph of Lucille Douglass was taken in 1896. (Courtesy Birmingham Public Library, Leona Caldwell Collection.)
Lucille Douglass and Hannah Elliot in Douglass’s studio in 1907. (Courtesy Birmingham Public Library, Hill Ferguson Collection.)
Lucille Douglass in Paris in 1911. (Courtesy Birmingham Public Library, Hill Ferguson Collection.)
This 15 9/16” x 11 13/16” etching of the sunset over Bayom, Angkor was rendered by Douglass in 1927. (Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZC26285.)
Lucille Douglass poses with a peacock feather fan in North Africa, date unknown. (Courtesy Birmingham Public Library Archives.)
This 9”x 11 ½” pastel on paper of a North African market scene was created by Douglass between 1909 and 1913. (Courtesy Birmingham Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Leona Templeton Caldwell.)
This 11 13/16” x 9” pastel on paper was created by Douglass between 1909 and 1913. (Courtesy Birmingham Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Leona Templeton Caldwell.)
Taken some time in the late twenties or early thirties, this photograph shows Lucille Douglass aboard a rickshaw on the streets of Shanghai, China. (Courtesy Birmingham Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Leona Templeton Caldwell.)
This 9 13/16” x 11 15/16” etching of the covered bridge at Nanjing was rendered by Douglass between 1921 and 1925. (Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-6282.)
This 7 3/8” x 10 15/16” etching of the way to the Chinese Ming Tombs was done by Douglass between 1921 and 1925. (Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-6284.)
This 10 7/8” x 14 ¾” etching of western entrance of Angkor Wat was rendered by Douglass in 1927. (Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-6283.)
 

Departments

Letter from the Editor
Alabama Heritage Turns Twenty

 In the summer of 1986, editor Suzanne Wolfe delivered the first issue of Alabama Heritage to an eager group of charter subscribers, many of whom continue their subscriptions today. She retired in 2001, with more than sixty issues to her credit. (Courtesy Suzanne Wolfe. Photograph by Crosby Thomley.)
Alabama Heritage, Issue No. 1, featured articles about the historical qualities of an heirloom quilt, the passion of the southerner for sports, the raucous politics of early Birmingham, and the career of black bandleader James Reese Europe.
Alabama Mysteries
Bangor Cave Casino
By Pam Jones

In the summer of 1937, J. Breck Musgrove and fellow investors opened Alabama’s only underground nightclub. This nightclub occupied the front caverns of Bangor Cave in Blount County, and no expense was spared to make it into a lavish (and illegal) destination. Governor Bibb Graves ordered the club, along with other “notorious dives,” closed down. But a few government raids couldn’t keep the Bangor Cave Club from being a huge success. In its heyday, the club attracted dancers, diners, gamblers, and criminals to its secret luxury, but now all that remains is a community of cave creatures and some dim outlines of a bar and orchestra pit.


About the Author
Pamela Jones is a freelance writer and researcher based in Birmingham.		 Two patrons enjoy libations at the fieldstone bar in Bangor Cave Club in the mid to late thirties. (Courtesy the Blount County Memorial Museum, Amy Rhudy, curator.)
Since its heyday and forced closure in the late 1930s, Bangor Cave still lures history enthusiasts and other curious visitors. (Courtesy the Blount County Memorial Museum, Amy Rhudy, curator.)
Sheriff J.C. Carr and Mrs. D.L. Hatborn, president of the Blount County Historical Society, inspect the bar inside Bangor Cave in 1968. (Courtesy the Blount County Memorial Museum, Amy Rhudy, curator.)
 
Nature Journal
The Two Faces of Dr. Nott
By L. J. Davenport

Dr. Josiah Nott settled in Mobile in 1837 and quickly established a successful medical practice in that city. Mobile frequently was visited by epidemics of yellow fever, and Nott helped treat many afflicted citizens. In an 1848 article, Nott declared his radical beliefs that yellow fever was different from other tropical fevers and that an insect must be involved in the spreading of the disease. Alas, these findings about yellow fever were not the Nott ideas to be embraced by the public. Instead, the ideas that got the most attention were Nott’s “scientific” theories supporting slavery.


About the Author
Larry Davenport is a professor of biology at Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.
 Josiah Clark Nott (1804–1873)—scientist, “anthropologist,” and medical educator—was overlooked for his most valuable theory and lauded for his most harmful one. (Courtesy UAB Historical Collections, University of Alabama at Birmingham.)
Recollections: A Gold Star Pilgrimage to Flanders Fields
By J. Darren Peterson

Among the 368 graves in the Flanders Field American Cemetery in Waregem, Belgium rests Pvt. William C. Barlow of Ashford— the only native Alabamian buried there. In spite of an attempt to be exempted due to “dependent parents,” Barlow was drafted on April 20, 1918. Newly married, he spent only five days with his bride before being called to duty. Barlow’s widow chose to have him laid to rest close to where he fell instead of bringing his body back to Alabama. In 1931, thanks to the Gold Star Pilgrimages program, Barlow’s mother and sister were able to visit the grave at last.


About the Author
A native of Alabama's Wiregrass region, J. Darren Peterson is a software engineer with a deep interest in history. 		Gathered at the monument at the Flanders Field American Cemetery are a group of Gold Star Pilgrims—the mothers and widows of fallen soldiers. (Courtesy Michael Kearney, in honor of Thomas Emmett Kearney and all those at Flanders Field.)
Alabama Album
Lung Learning

Errata
• On page 41 in “From Tuskegee to Angkor: The Odyssey of Lucille Douglass,” the phrase “HMS Titanic” should have read, “RMS Titanic.”

• There are a couple of errors in the article entitled “Toulmin & Hitchcock: Pioneering Jurists of the Alabama Frontier.” A descendent of Harry Toulmin has notified us that the often-published death date of 1824 for Toulmin is incorrect. He died in 1823. Also the photograph identified as “the home of Harry Toulmin” is actually the home of his son. We are in search of a photograph of Toulmin’s last home and will post it online when we find it.

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