Issue 140, Spring 2021
On the cover: Octavia Walton painted by Thomas Sully in 1833. [Historic Mobile Preservation Society/Bob Peck]
Features
Larger than Life: Margaret Bourke-White’s Photomurals of the Chattahoochee Valley
By Robin Watson and Frances Osborn Robb
In the 1930s, the Chattahoochee Valley held five textile mills, and when the company that owned them decided to celebrate these structures via photographs displayed in their new research laboratory, they sent photographer Margaret Bourke-White. White, whose work had graced the covers of notable magazines, had been a trailblazing female war photographer and had traveled to the Soviet Union for photo shoots. Today her mill images are housed in the collections of the H. Grady Bradshaw Chambers County Library and Cobb Memorial Archives, thanks to critical efforts to preserve and restore them.
Black Heritage at Selma’s Old Depot Museum
By Justin A. Rudder
Many people know Selma, Alabama, for its role in the civil rights movement, particularly events such as Bloody Sunday. However, the town’s Black community has a rich and multi-faceted history that encompasses many other significant events as well, including the development of the railroad. Thanks to the Old Depot Museum and its dedicated staff, board members, and supporters, the complex history of the area’s Black residents is preserved for all to learn about and celebrate.
An Unconventional Belle: Octavia Walton Levert
By Paula Lenor Webb
Though not well-known today, in her era, Octavia LeVert possessed a charm that won her numerous fans, acquaintances, and admirers across the United States. LeVert befriended such notables as statesman Henry Clay, frontiersman David Crockett, and author Washington Irving, and her life seemed in many ways to be filled with the world’s finer things. However, LeVert was familiar with struggle and tragedy, particularly after the death of several beloved family members, and later in her life she turned to writing and speaking as a means of supporting herself and her family members. Through it all, she remained an emblem of her age and a confident, intelligent woman grappling with the world around her.
Places in Peril 2020
By Lee Anne Hewett Wofford
Each year, Alabama Heritage joins with the Alabama Historical Commission and the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation to identify and raise awareness about historically significant properties that are at great risk in the state. This year’s structures include churches, residential and commercial buildings, a school, and a theater—all in need of intervention to ensure their preservation for future generations.
Department Abstracts
Alabama Treasures
The Legacy of Shiloh Rosenwald School
By Frye Gaillard and Marti Rosner
Thanks to the vision of entrepreneur Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington, for a time multiple Rosenwald schools graced the southern landscape. These schools were created to offer educational opportunities to rural Black children. The Shiloh Rosenwald School, one of the original six structures, holds a significant place in the educational and cultural history of the state.
Alabama Governors
Robert B. Lindsay (1870-1872)
Alabama’s only foreign-born governor, Robert Lindsay held the office during a tumultuous time, and he struggled with his predecessor’s legacy. This legacy overshadowed the positive things Lindsay accomplished or advanced, including combatting the Ku Klux Klan. He faced medical problems shortly after leaving office, and he spent the remainder of his life grappling with those rather than pursuing professional pursuits.
Behind the Image
Decorum in the Studio and Tidy in Town
By Frances Osborn Robb
An image from Daniel Roswell Cyrenus Redington (1840–1900), a photographer in Birmingham in the late nineteenth century, reveals a young woman whose neat, polished appearance reflects both her era and her stature. Frances Robb explains the image’s nuanced details, elucidating cultural and historical tidbits in the process.
From the Archives
Boldly Forward in the Digital Age
By Scotty E. Kirkland
Though the Covid-19 pandemic has raised unprecedented hardship for numerous archival and cultural institutions, the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH)’s foresight and technological savvy have served it well during this time. Archival staff have developed new projects relying on crowd-sourced transcriptions, capitalizing on volunteer efforts from around the globe. Thanks to those volunteers—and to memorial fund established by Nelle Harper Lee in honor of a friend—ADAH has overseen the recent transcription of numerous military and women’s history records, making valuable records accessible to people throughout the world.
Portraits and Landscapes
What Happened to Space City USA?
By Stephanie L. Robertson
For a time, young Alabamans exulted in the promise of a monumental change in the state’s entertainment landscape: the creation of an amusement park named Space City USA. Designed to capitalize on the relative scarcity of such attractions in the 1960s South, the park was also intended to highlight Alabama’s contributions to the Space Race. Though development and construction began—and some fortunate visitors even got to take a train ride during an open house—the park never officially opened. Today, Space City USA remains a little-known memory, a dream that flashed, then faded, almost as quickly as a shooting star.
The Nature Journal
Little Something Creek
Often people speak about retreating to nature as a chance to “get away from it all.” However, what they may not realize is just how many creatures already populate the fields, forests, and streams to which they retreat. In this quarter’s installment of “Nature Journal,” biologist and naturalist Larry Davenport guides readers on a descriptive field trip, chronicling the different entities that just might inhabit your local creek.
Reading the Southern Past
The Civil War Past and Present
Though Civil War books abound, some of them offer fresh, perhaps even surprising, approaches to the topic. One such book, Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic (Vintage Books, 1998), presented the experiences of a Virginian who decided to learn more about the reenactors outside his home. Decades later, the author toured the south to learn about a different subject: landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who made his own southern tour generations before. The later book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide (Penguin Press, 2019), was to be Horowitz’s final text. Taken together, these works offer an interesting pair of perspectives on life in the contemporary south.
