Click image to enlarge. In the decades just before and after the Civil War, the Pearce Mill complex along the Buttachatchee River near Hamilton, south of Tuscumbia, was a bustling economic hub. In the early 1870s, James P. Pearce developed the grist mill his father had built in the 1840s into a thriving community by adding a saw mill, cotton gin, and general store that were surrounded by support structures, operatives quarters, and his impressive two-story Victorian home.
Today little of the built environment of the Pearce Mills National Register Historic District is left amid the heavy vegetation that has all but reclaimed the woodland site. Pearce’s derelict home, a few outbuildings, a steel truss bridge, a Depression-era tenant house, and a cemetery remain on the remote 3,000 acre tract that is privately owned. What does the future hold for this historic agricultural service center that railroads and other modern transportation innovations have marginalized?
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