Issue 115, Winter 2015
On the cover: The Marion Military Institute Color Guard at the 2013 Alabama Military Hall of Honor Induction ceremony. [Marion Military Institute Foundation]
Features
Florence: Discovering Alabama’s Renaissance City
By Carolyn M. Barske
In 1818 the Cypress Land Company held the first auction for land in a new town on the banks of the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama. Since then, Florence has grown into a thriving community with strong educational, agricultural, and industrial roots.
As it approaches its two-hundredth anniversary, the community of Florence has lots to celebrate. Founded by a conglomerate that included Andrew Jackson and situated near the Tennessee River at a crossroads of nineteenth-century trade and expansion, through the centuries Florence has retained its historical charm and character, even as it advances into the twenty-first century. Throughout its history, Florence has adapted to circumstances and conditions, developing new educational institutions, arts centers, and important industrial facilities even as it maintains its small-town charm. Carolyn Barske explores the many characteristics that have helped Florence earned the nickname of Alabama’s Renaissance city—a tribute to the community and a reminder of the Italian city for which it was named.
Sarah Gayle and Violence in the Old Southwest
By Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins
When Sarah Haynsworth’s family settled on the Alabama frontier, it was quite an unruly place, still a territory and marked by wars between settlers and the Native Americans they displaced, and ruled largely by the violence and wildness of the American southwest. Her marriage to John Gayle allowed Sarah to experience life at the center of Alabama’s early statehood. Thanks to her diaries—many composed in Sarah’s long stretches of isolation while John, one of Alabama’s early governors, traveled—we have a lively and poignant understanding of life in this violent and often lonely time. Sarah’s journals offer a rare and sensitive glimpse of the opportunities and challenges faced by the state of Alabama’s first women settlers.
Alabama’s Own Henry B. Walthall
By Joanna Jacobs
For a brief moment toward the beginning of the motion picture industry, one of the biggest stars in the world was a slight, refined, serious-looking farmer’s son from central Alabama.
Although little-known today, Henry B. Walthall once graced screens and captivated audiences nationwide, starring in numerous films, playing a wide range of roles, and successfully transitioning from the silent film era into the “talkies.” An Alabama native, Walthall often played southern men, from gentlemen to scoundrels, kind souls to the founder of the KKK. Walthall adopted a private persona, but his life held plenty of its own drama, making him as fascinating a character as the people he played on the big screen.
Marion Military Institute: The Military College of Alabama
By Joseph W. (“Bill”) Mathews Jr.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, Howard College experienced a large change—its relocation from Marion to Birmingham, where it eventually became Samford University. The campus left behind in Marion benefitted from the presence of J.T. Murfee, who had been Howard College’s president and who stayed in the community, founding the Marion Institute. Thanks to Murfee and his descendants, the Marion Institute helped establish a tradition of military education that continues to thrive today.
Departments
Southern Architecture and Preservation
The Tabernacle: Centerpiece of Alabama’s Early Camp Meetings
By Michael Panhorst
Michael Panhorst is admittedly “hooked” on vernacular religious architecture. Here he introduces Alabama Heritage readers to the architecture of old-time camp meetings. An outgrowth of the evangelical revival that swept post–Revolutionary America, the campground and its tabernacles were at one time distinctive features of the rural Alabama landscape. Very few of these once-common structures survive, but Panhorst explains their significance to some of Alabama’s religious communities.
Becoming Alabama
Quarter by Quarter
By Joseph W. Pearson, Megan L. Bever, and Matthew Downs
In this quarter’s installment of “Becoming Alabama,” Joseph Pearson explores the effect of the Battle of New Orleans on the tensions between Creeks and settlers. Megan Bever illuminates the havoc wreaked by John Croxton and his men, known as Croxton’s Raiders, as they swept through Tuscaloosa, destroying much of the town and the University of Alabama campus. Finally, Matthew Downs details the assassination of civil rights leader Malcolm X. In each component of this department, authors demonstrate how significant moments in Alabama’s past also reflected the larger issues at work in our nation.
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.
Alabama Governors
William Wyatt Bibb (1819-1820) and Thomas Bibb (1820-1821)
By Samuel L. Webb
William Wyatt Bibb, one of Alabama’s early settlers, was named its territorial governor in 1817. Although he held a somewhat contentious position, he won the race to become Alabama’s first state governor. Upon William’s death, his brother Thomas, president of the Alabama state senate, assumed the governorship. Samuel L. Webb reflects on the Bibb family legacy in this installment of the “Alabama Governors” column.
From the Archives
Alabamians in the Great War
By Graham Neeley and Georgia Ann Conner
Editor’s Note: This issue of Alabama Heritage inaugurates a new department on the collections of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Curator Graham Neeley sheds light on the process by which the archives came to acquire a particularly strong collection of World War I artifacts and records, many of which are currently on display in a new exhibit, “Alabamians in the Great War,” in the archives’ Museum of Alabama.
The new archival exhibit commemorates the notable contributions of Alabama servicemen in World War One. Many artifacts including some extremely rare items, were collected, thanks largely to members of the 167th Infantry Regiment, led by Alabama’s own Col. Bill Screws.
Alabama Women
The Crusade of “Mrs. Moses”: Ida Mathis and the Cotton Crisis of 1914
By Rebecca Montgomery
A well-educated woman, Ida Brandon grew up in the Florence community, where she was prepared for a quiet domestic life. However, after marrying Giles Huffman Mathis and inheriting money of her own, Ida set out to do something radically different from what her upbringing had prepared her for: she decided to revolutionize the American agricultural system. Through her innovative ideas and careful teaching, she did just that.
The Nature Journal
Sundown at Sauta Cave
Larry Davenport describes a thrilling biological ritual: the period at sundown when nearly 250,000 grey bats leave the Sauta Cave in search of food. In the process, he reminds readers of the precarious place occupied by this endangered species and how fortunate Alabama is that they grace the state’s caves.
Reading the Southern Past
Freedom Summer—1964
In this quarter’s “Reading the Southern Past,” Stephen Goldfarb tackles the historical period fifty years ago, when civil rights issues remained at the forefront of both the south and the nation. Under discussion are James P. Marshall’s Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960–1965 (Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Charles E. Cobb Jr.’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books, 2014); and Joel Katz’s And I Said No Lord: A Twenty-One-Year-Old in Mississippi in 1964 (University of Alabama Press, 2014).