Issue 111, Winter 2014
On the cover: Detail of weathered steam engine components at Sloss Furnaces by Randall Connaughton.
Features
Nature, Chance, and War: The Birth of Burnt Corn, Alabama
By Jacob F. Lowery III and Carey Cauthen
In the 1980s, Dothan received recognition primarily for negative reasons, even being named one of the nation’s “Worst Cities” by Rand McNally. Residents, aware that the town’s rich history transcended the agricultural feats it was most known for, decided to take action, and eventually, their passion gave rise to the Murals of the Wiregrass, a series of nearly twenty outdoor art installations that celebrate the area’s diverse accomplishments, notable cultural and historical moments, and significant residents. Today, these murals have helped put Dothan on the cultural and artistic map—a very different map than the one Rand McNally envisioned several decades ago—and have offered a colorful history lesson of the people and events that shaped this community.
Grey Troops at Blue Mountain
By Greg Starnes
Although it is now a small hamlet, during the Civil War, the Blue Mountain community in Calhoun County played a significant role, serving as a center for troops as well as a munitions depot. The area also sent a number of men to the war, including John Pelham, whose accomplishments earned praise from Robert E. Lee and other commanders. Factors contributing to Blue Mountain’s importance were its role as a railroad hub and the town’s arsenal. Once those fell under attack, Blue Mountain itself fell, marking the end of one of Alabama’s most important Civil War strongholds.
Mill Village Life at Blue Mountain
By Sarah Cole
After the Civil War, Blue Mountain’s future looked rather bleak. However, with Anniston’s founding during Reconstruction, the entire Calhoun County area experienced a resurgence, mostly driven by iron production. Eventually, Blue Mountain established itself as a textile headquarters, and the town’s mill kept families working for decades. Residents felt they were part of a unique community—one brought together by mechanized production, but unified by the common goal of wholesome family life in a friendly small town. As international business developed, though, the textile economy suffered, and Blue Mountain’s fate grew less secure. Today, the town remains mostly shuttered and forgotten, inhabited by only a few remaining residents who fondly remember the way it once was.
Sloss Furnaces: The Art of Industry
Text by Bob Wendorf, photography by Randall Connaughton
Although best known for its functional roles in the economy and history of Birmingham, Sloss Furnaces is also a haunting and beautiful structure. Dating back to the 1880s, the facility remains a focal point of the Birmingham community, educating visitors on the history of pig iron production and offering hands-on activities and tours. And as Randall Connaughton’s photographs demonstrate, it also presents a stunning aesthetic experience, showing how form and function may unite into a thing of beauty.
[Alabama Department of Archives and History]
The Welfare of a Nation: Birmingham’s Young Women and the Emerging Domestic Science Curriculum of the Early Twentieth Century
By Kelsey Scouten Bates
At the turn of the twentieth century, school systems nationwide—including those such as Birmingham’s—started to recognize a new curricular demand: the need to include domestic science courses. Although women were still outside the norm in traditional sciences, domestic science—what would eventually become known colloquially as home economics—legitimized the role of homemakers and recognized the important work women were doing throughout the country. But women didn’t stop there. Domestic science became a platform through which women could affect the health and well-being not only of their families but of their entire communities.
Departments
Southern Architecture and Preservation
The Vanishing Country Store
By Robert Gamble
Not so long ago, the American landscape was graced with a number of community focal points—a place where passersby could stop in for a drink or directions, or where locals could congregate on the porch to exchange news or whittle away an afternoon. But as with many elements of earlier times, the country store has faded, too, disappearing in favor of more modernized retail corridors. Robert Gamble, the senior architectural historian for the Alabama Historical Commission, explores the state’s remaining country stores, detailing their architectural and cultural significance.
Becoming Alabama
Quarter by Quarter
By Joseph W. Pearson, Megan L. Bever, and Matthew Downs
This quarter’s installment of Becoming Alabama takes readers to Andrew Jackson’s skirmishes with Red Stick Creek Indians near the Tallapoosa River, in the days leading up to what would become known as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. In the Civil War component of this department, we consider the naval exploits of the era, focusing on the Hunley and on Mobile’s Raphael Semmes, who made his name in command of a number of different wartime vessels. And in the civil rights era, we revisit the landmark case New York Times v. Sullivan, in which the U.S. Supreme Court made significant protections of first amendment rights—and secured the ability of civil rights activists to share their stories from the segregated South.
Editor’s Note: Alabama Heritage, the Summersell Center for Study of the South, the University of Alabama Department of History, and the Alabama Tourism Department offer this department as a part of the statewide “Becoming Alabama” initiative—a cooperative venture of state organizations to commemorate Alabama’s experiences related to the Creek War, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. Quarter by quarter we will take you to the corresponding seasons 200, 150, and 50 years ago—sometimes describing the most pivotal events, sometimes describing daily life, but always illuminating a world in flux. We will wait for the ultimate outcomes as our forbears did—over time.
[Courtesy Library of Congress]
Alabama Women
Daphne Cunningham’s World: Student Life at Alabama in the 1910s
By Lisa Lindquist Dorr
Among the treasures at the University of Alabama’s W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library is the diary of Daphne Cunningham, a student at the university in the 1910s. As one of the earliest women to enroll at the university, Cunningham occupied a particularly interesting space in the school’s history. Her diary sheds compelling light on everyday life in that era—on campus and beyond, and it details how some attitudes towards dating, dancing, and other relational issues may be different than we might expect a century later.
Revealing Hidden Collections
Uncovering Tuskegee’s Hidden Legacy: The Southern Courier
By Dana R. Chandler
Tuskegee University bears a long history of engagement with African American and civil rights issues, but one aspect of it that few people know about is its archival collection of the Southern Courier, the Montgomery-based weekly newspaper that educated readers on the civil rights movement from 1965–1968. The Tuskegee collection contains the papers and various materials concerning its founding and publication, offering a rare and valuable window on an institution central to the massive changes sweeping the state and the nation in that era.
Portraits & Landscapes
Remembering Jonathan Myrick Daniels
By Scott A. Merriman
Although not a native of the South, Jonathan Myrick Daniels felt drawn to the area during the civil rights movement, when he took a leave from his seminary studies and traveled to Alabama to volunteer as an activist. Daniels was murdered in the aftermath of a protest, and he later became recognized by the Episcopal Church as a martyr, leading to an annual pilgrimage in which participants retrace his final steps through Hayneville, where a small, somewhat secluded marker memorializes his death.
The Nature Journal
A Vestavia Hills Almanac
In this quarter’s installment of Nature Journal, our intrepid naturalist takes a closer look at his own yard and one particular pesky plant—a dying silver maple dropping its limbs at inopportune times. Through the course of the year, Davenport considers his nemesis and the history of its species, finally deciding that he just might be able to live with it after all.
Reading the Southern Past
The End of the Old South
This quarter, Stephen Goldfarb explores the post–World War II South, looking at its history and the rampant changes occurring as veterans returned home from war. Among the books under review are James C. Cobb’s The South and America since World War II (Oxford University Press, 2012), Bruce J. Schulman’s From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Duke University Press, 1994), and Kari Frederickson’s book Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South (University of Georgia Press, 2013).
