Issue 128, Spring 2018
On the cover: A resettled family at Skyline Farms. [Photo courtesy Library of Congress]
Features
“Lives Rich in Pathos and Humor”
The Art of Mary Wallace Kirk
Mary Wallace Kirk, who spent nearly her entire life (almost ninety years) in Tuscumbia, devoted herself to documenting the lives of fellow Alabamians through her writing and art. After early training in Alabama, Kirk briefly studied art in New York, where she developed her affinity for etching (which became her primary practice, though she continued painting as well) and the American Scene Movement, which was also known as Regionalism. For decades, Kirk depicted the lives of her neighbors and other community members, offering a particularly sensitive glimpse of tenant farmers and other individuals who had infrequently been the subject of professional artwork.
Skyline Farms
A New Deal Community
By Cynthia Rice
As the Great Depression ravaged communities across America, government leaders sought any possible intervention to aid their constituents. One such intervention, created under a Federal Emergency Relief Agency program, was Alabama’s Skyline Farms, a community designed to assist farmers in Jackson County. Skyline employed men throughout the county, rotating shifts and ensuring that all the community’s families had an opportunity to earn some income. The families also built the town, including its houses, municipal buildings, and a few retail establishments, such as a co-op where residents could purchase necessities. Before the community project was terminated due to World War II, its residents established a name for themselves, even visiting the White House at the request of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Humphry Osmond
Psychiatric Power in Alabama
By Cynthia Carson Bisbee
Ever since reformer Dorothea Dix’s visit in the mid-1800s, Alabama’s treatment of mental health issues has attracted attention outside the state. By 1970, such treatment was the subject of a federal court case, Wyatt v. Stickney, which argued that the state should improve its patient care. During the era in which Tuscaloosa’s Bryce Hospital was seeking to make sure improvements, it hired Dr. Humphry Osmond, a specialist in schizophrenia whose research and theories would come to shape the field and improve the life of patients throughout Alabama. Though Osmond’s ideas—which he frequently developed in conversation with his friend Aldous Huxley—were often ahead of his time, many of them have been borne out by advancements in the field.
Auburn’s Marengo Jake
Nineteenth-Century Raconteur
By Kathryn M. Lawrence
During a five-year period in the late nineteenth century, several Alabama newspapers collected and published articles by Robert Wilton Burton, an Auburn resident. Though Burton was the articles’ author, they all consisted of stories attributed to a man named Marengo Jake, an African American whose affection for Clarke County pervaded all his narratives. Though many facts remain unknown about Jake, his colorful and creative personality shine through each story, whether it described an onslaught of frogs or how Jake helped elect Pres. Grover Cleveland.
Editor’s Note: Do you have any information regarding Burton, Mitchell, and Jake’s Marengo Stories? If so, the author and her fellow researcher, Bert Hitchcock, would love to hear it! Please contact them at the following: Kathy Lawrence at kathryn.lawrence@levyk12.org and Bert Hitchcock at hitchwb@auburn.edu.
Department Abstracts
Alabama Makers
Old Dutch Ice Cream Shoppe
By Aimee Gueret
Though many Alabama makers focus on art objects or material good, Alabama’s unique products range across all areas—including food products! One special Alabama treat originates from Mobile, where locals have visited the Old Dutch Ice Cream Shoppe for decades. Originally owned by Edwin Widemire, the shop is now run by Cammie Wayne, a former employee who purchased it in 1998. Under Wayne’s leadership, Old Dutch Ice Cream Shoppe’s products have delighted customers throughout Alabama—and are even making their way into nearby states.
Alabama 200
Places, Projects, Institutes: An Alabama 200 Update
By Jay Lamar
As Alabama’s bicentennial celebration continues, a number of programs and exhibits commemorate the state’s two-hundredth anniversary.
The Alabama Territory
Quarter by Quarter: Spring 1818
By Mike Bunn
As the Alabama Territory grew more established, it developed significant elements of a large and burgeoning community, particularly transportation systems. Thanks to the area’s growing dependence on cotton, steamboats became a crucial means of transporting products to other territories and states, thereby equipping the industry that would become central to Alabama’s social structure and economy, through the territorial era and many decades of its statehood.
Alabama Governors
Henry W. Collier (1849-1853)
By Samuel L. Webb
Born in Virginia, Henry Collier lived in South Carolina and Tennessee before becoming Alabama’s governor in 1849. Prior to being elected to the state’s highest role, Collier served in a range of other elected and appointed positions, and his political ambitions likely benefitted from relationship, through a family marriage, to the Clay family. Among the lasting effects of his two terms is the Alabama State Capitol building, still in use today.
Southern Folkways
Step Sing: A Samford Campus Tradition An Alabama Cultural Tradition
By Morgan K. Morris
Before it became Samford University, Birmingham’s Howard College began developing some of the traditions that would define its campus community into the twenty-first century. Among these traditions, perhaps the most vibrant is Step Sing, a choreographed singing and dancing event that attracts an audience from throughout the Birmingham community and draws back alumni each year.
Behind the Image
A Very Early Photograph on Paper
By Frances Osborn Robb
Unframing a paper print reveals many clues about its subject. Thanks to careful research and close attention to cultural clues—including the orange blossom wreath worn by the young woman photographed—this image’s mysteries have finally been unlocked.
From the Archives
The Paper and the Preacher: How the Southern Courier Reported the King Assassination
By Scotty E. Kirkland
Through its brief tenure, the Southern Courier established itself as one of the premiere sources of information on the civil rights movement. As such, it had a rich history of covering the work of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and upon his death, the paper devoted several issues to covering his funeral. In addition to articles by multiple contributors, covering King’s memorial and contextualizing it within southern funeral traditions, the paper offered numerous stunning photographs taken by its principal photographer, Jim Peppler. Taken together, these components offered a moving and persuasive tribute to one of the most recognizable figures of the civil rights movement.
Portraits & Landscapes
The Gal on the Gun
By Jared Galloway
Visitors to Mobile’s USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park may notice an interesting embellishment on one of the ship’s gun breech blocks: a faded but engaging figure of a blonde woman nicknamed Bea wearing a kerchief, a short black dress, and heels, leaning over to answer a telephone. Thanks to careful sleuthing, Bea’s history has emerged, revealing that she was drawn to evoke the fiancée of a young serviceman aboard the ship during World War II. Thanks to the memories of Beatrice Hawkins, Bea’s real-life model, Jared Galloway has illuminated this artistic piece of history.
photographed in 2008, showed signs of
wear. [Jared Galloway]
Adventures in Genealogy
Ancestry at Your Local Library
By Donna Cox Baker
Thanks to the bicentennial celebrations taking place around Alabama, the state’s library system has subscribed to Ancestry Library Edition, a database designed to further genealogy research. With access to more than thirty thousand databases, all contained in the Ancestry Library Edition, Alabama’s amateur genealogists will be well on their way to discovering their family’s history. This database is available until 2019, so it’s a perfect time to stop by your local library and dig into your own ancestry. You might just be surprised to learn about your ancestors’ accomplishments or circumstances!
Reading the Southern Past
Civil War Miscellany
This quarter’s installment of “Reading the Southern Past” explores several recent texts dedicated to illuminating lesser-known aspects of the Civil War. James McPherson’s War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) focuses on the significance of each side’s naval forces, including the important efforts of troops on the nation’s rivers. In Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), Andrew McIlwaine Bell describes the toll of nineteenth-century disease on both Confederates and Union soldiers, explaining how the Union’s preventative tactics may have had a profound effect on the war’s outcome. Finally, George C. Rable’s Damn Yankees!: Demonization & Defiance in the Confederate South (Louisiana State University Press, 2015) investigates the animosity that fueled the conflict—and the relationship between North and South well after the war’s conclusion.
