Issue 77, Summer 2005
On the cover: Portrait of Zitella Cocke by Nicola Marshall, 1869. This outstanding portrait shows Cocke in her twenties. [Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History]
Features
Variations on a Capitol Plan
By Robert O. Mellown
William Nichols, an English-born architect who practiced in the South in the first half of the nineteenth century, did much to shape our ideas about what a state capitol should look like. In February 1827 the Alabama Legislature selected him as the building superintendent and architect for the new capitol. When he arrived in Tuscaloosa in the spring of 1827, he was forty-seven years old and at the height of his creative powers. But Tuscaloosa’s days as the seat of government were numbered, for social and political forces were shifting the center of population and the balance of political power to the central part of the state. Nichols used architecture to express the ideals of the young republic and, though his statehouses in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi have long ago been replaced, he made an indelible contribution to the development of this uniquely American building type.
Zitella Cocke: Alabama’s Forgotten Poet
By Jennifer L. Beck
Born in Marion, Alabama, in 1840, Julia Zitella Cocke was the oldest of eight children. At the age of seven, Zitella had completed her first poem. She attended and later taught at the Judson Female Institute. By age fifty, Cocke had made a name for herself as a writer and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. The city’s numerous magazines and newspapers offered Zitella rich publishing opportunities.
Southerners, however, did not buy many of her books, despite favorable criticism in Alabama newspapers. When a publisher asked her about this, she replied, “You have taken the living of the South, how can you expect her to buy books!” Though largely forgotten today, she published three books of poetry, and her poems and essays appeared frequently in magazines. When she returned to Alabama a frail and elderly woman, she was honored by the state legislature and the literary community as a prominent poet and a worthy Alabamian.
Where There’s a Will: The Story of Indian Springs School
By Pam Jones
In 1930 Harvey G. Woodward, a childless Birmingham millionaire, left the bulk of his fortune—nearly seven and a half million dollars—to endow an educational foundation he hoped would improve life in Alabama by creating quality private schools for average boys. Woodward’s vision stalled for nearly two decades while his widow, and later two members of the foundation’s board of governors, contested the will, which was encumbered with numerous eccentric provisos.
Finally, in 1947 the Alabama Supreme Court ruled the remaining funds from the trust were to be used to set up a single school. This would become the Indian Springs School. Louis Edgar Armstrong, the man hired to make Woodward’s dream a reality, had no intention of quietly going along with restrictions he believed were wrong. Within a few years of its opening, this small experimental school would attract national attention for its faculty’s maverick approach to secondary education.
Alabama Lifestyles and Landscapes: Photography of the Geological Survey
By Frances Osborn Robb
For twenty-five years state geologists tramped the woods and riverbanks of post-Reconstruction Alabama, capturing landscapes and lifestyles that have now faded. Frances Osborn Robb presents a selection of photographs from a new exhibit, Science into History: The Photographs of Eugene Allen Smith and the Geological Survey of Alabama. Taken between 1885 and 1910 by Dr. Eugene Allen Smith and his GSA associates, the photographs recall a moment in time when the state’s abundant natural resources were being used in early industrial endeavors.
Departments
Recollections
The Fairhope Quaker Exodus
By Jeff Gunderson
In October, 1948, a group of four Quakers were arrested for refusing to participate in the military draft. Though they were released four months into their sentence, these conscientious objectors decided that they were no longer welcome in the United States; accordingly, they decided to move to Costa Rica, where they would establish a settlement that would preserve their way of life and ultimately lead to the creation of the Monteverde Biological Cloud Forest Reserve.
The Nature Journal
Ergot (on Rye)
The fungus ergot has historically served as both a medicine and a poison. Medicinally, it has been used to ease the pain of childbirth. Consumed unawares, however, ergot can lead to convulsions and gangrene–conditions that may be linked historically to such phenomena as the ignis sacer (holy fire) of the Middle Ages and the manifestations reported in accused witches of a later period.
