There was nothing organic about the founding of Birmingham. No river, no deep water port, no verdant valley. In fact, the creation of the town can be traced to a specific date - June 1, 1871, when a small group of Southern planters, investors, and railroad men organized the Elyton Land Company to buy 4,150 acres of raw land in north central Alabama. Their new town would be sited at the crossing of the Alabama & Chattanooga and South & North Alabama railroads nearby known deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone. The Elyton men were not burdened by any romantic images for their proposed town; the name they chose announced their vision for the enterprise - Birmingham, after the leading industrial town in England.
Early growth was stunted right at the start by an outbreak of cholera and a national financial crisis in 1873 but the dollar signs attached to those mineral deposits insured this was going to be a town to be reckoned with. The boom hit with a vengeance in the 1880s and would continue through the Great Depression of the 1930s. In that half-century Birmingham became the industrial center of the South with steel mills and blast furnaces going full bore, railroads building in every direction and mines operating 24 hours a day. Around the country Birmingham became known as “The Magic City” or “The Pittsburgh of the South.” The population grew from 3,000 to over a quarter million residents.
The Depression doused the explosive growth in the city but the decline in American manufacturing affected Birmingham less than many Northern towns. Steel production continues around the city and the financial sector blossomed into one of the nation’s leading banking centers. The University of Alabama at Birmingham emerged as a major medical research facility and is now the area’s leading employer.
The Birmingham streetscape mirrors its economic history almost exactly. The major commercial buildings arrived so fast and furiously in the early 1900s that one intersection was billed as “The Heaviest Corner on Earth.” Then, from the 1920s until the 1960s not one significant new commercial property was developed. Our walking tour to trace this history will begin at the head of 20 Street North, Birmingham’s “main street,” in a shady plaza named for the man who, more than anyone else, believed in what the town could become when all anyone could see was “a poor, insignificant Southern village” not even worthy of Union attack in the Civil War...
This area was long known to travelers for its “big spring” which was a reliable source of fresh water. There were some half-hearted attempts at settlement but an abundance of mosquitoes and black bears sent homesteaders elsewhere. John Hunt, a Revolutionary War veteran, however persevered in 1805. Hunt did not have the money to register his claim properly and “Hunt’s Spring” and much surrounding land were gobbled up by a Georgian planter and lawyer named LeRoy Pope for $23 an acre. The energetic Pope laid out streets, built a house on the village’s highest hill and got his town named the County seat for Madison County that had been formed in 1808 and named for the newly sworn in fourth President of the United States, James Madison. Pope named the town Twickeham after the estate of his distant relative, the celebrated English satiric poet, Alexander Pope. The name never caught on with the newcomers who arrived to live in the town and the territorial legislature named the town after the squatter, John Hunt.
Huntsville grew rapidly on the back of King Cotton as the surrounding fields could yield a thousand pounds of the crop per acre. The town was peppered with the offices of those involved in the cotton trade - factors and lawyers and bankers. During harvest season Huntsville would be overrun with carts and wagons of cotton farmers bringing their crops in to be graded and auctioned off. The entire west side of Court Square at the center of town was reserved for business on “Cotton Row.”
As a frontier metropolis Huntsville hosted the Alabama constitutional convention to hammer out the details pursuant to statehood in 1819. When Alabama was accepted into the Union as the 22nd state Huntsville was designated the temporary capital. Here, Alabama’s first governor was inaugurated and its first legislature convened.
In 1855, the Memphis and Charleston Railroad was constructed through Huntsville, becoming the first railway to link the Atlantic seacoast with the lower Mississippi River. The Civil War, during which Huntsville was used as a Union base of operations after the town fell in 1863, put a crimp on progress but after the war the area became a center for cotton textile mills and a building boom took place that lasted from the 1890s until the Great Depression of the 1930s. During that time other industries and crops became prominent, most notably watercress. So much of the semi-aquatic vegetable was cultivated in the 1940s that the area was known as the “Watercress Capital of the World.”
Still, by 1940 Huntsville was still a small town of some 13,000 people. With the coming of World War II the government built three chemical munitions plants southwest of the city, employing 20,000 personnel. When the war ended the plants were mothballed and designated for redevelopment. One attempt was by the Keller Motor Company but only 18 of their innovative automobiles were ever produced before the death of George D. Keller brought an end to production. In 1950 the United States Army brought its Ordnance Guided Missile Center to the abandoned plants under the leadership of Wernher von Braun, acknowledged as the “greatest rocket scientist of the 20th century.” The work in Huntsville laid the foundation for America’s space program and earned the city the nickname “The Rocket City.”
Today, Huntsville’s population tops 180,000 but we’ll begin our walking tour at the site more than 200 years ago when the population was just one - where John Hunt shook off the mosquitoes and shooed the bears and built a cabin...
In 1699 Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, then only 19, was urged by his brother Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, 19 years his senior and the first great Canadian adventurer born in North America, to settle a defensive position on the eastern edge of the French holdings on the Gulf of Mexico. In 1702 Bienville selected a spot on a bluff of a river near where it was ending its 45-mile run to the sea and established the first capital of the French colony of Louisiana.
Whereas the colonization of America is rife with conflicts with the indigenous peoples Europeans were displacing, Bienville had the opposite problem - he was worried about his French soldiers fraternizing with the native women of the Mobilian tribe. In 1704 he imported 23 women from Cuba, known as “casquette girls” for the boxes they carried, to the colony. In addition to the girls the ship, the Pelican, also carried yellow fever. The disease would send the population of the colony from 279 to 178 and, with a series of floods, precipitate the relocation of the town downriver to its present location in 1711. In 1720 the capital of Louisiana was moved to Biloxi and Mobile settled into a role as a military and trading center. In the next 100 years the French flag and the Spanish flag and the British flag would all fly over the town until 1813 when Mobile was included in the Mississippi Territory under American jurisdiction. At the time the sleepy frontier town barely numbered 300 people.
Mobile quickly bloomed in the American economy, becoming a leading player in the cotton trade. By the time of the Civil War Mobile was the fourth busiest port in the United States. In that conflict Union forces would eventually take control of Mobile Bay in August of 1864 and the city would surrender to avoid destruction. Ironically less than two months after the war ended an explosion at a federal ammunition depot shattered the city and claimed a reported 300 lives.
Federal grants of more than $3 million in the early 20th century to deepen the shipping channels in the harbor lay the groundwork for Mobile becoming a modern city. Shipbuilding and steel production made Mobile a vital piece of America’s war efforts in World War I and World War II. In its rise as one of the Gulf Coast’s main economic and cultural centers, Mobile was an enthusiastic participant in urban renewal. Yet many heritage structures still remain scattered around the city, including antebellum houses and surviving examples of Creole achitecture. As a nod to baseball home run king and Mobile native son, Henry Aaron, we will seek out 44 heritage landmarks downtown in the Port City and our walking tour will begin in ground that the United States Congress decreed would be forever used as a city park back in 1824...
Most town founders who settled America had grand dreams for the ventures they were starting; most would be unrealized. Andrew Dexter was no different. In 1816, after he purchased a chunk of Mississippi Territorial land on the south bank of the Alabama River in and started laying out building plots he gave his new town the name of New Philadelphia, echoing the nation’s first capital city. So sure was Dexter that his town would one day be the seat of a new state government that he reserved a plot of land up on top of Goat Hill for a capitol building. Dexter’s wasn’t even the only town in the area. Right next door was a settlement of Georgians led by General John Scott called East Alabama.
The two fledgling towns bickered as they grew and finally on December 3, 1819, eleven days before Alabama became a state, the two towns merged and called themselves Montgomery. Mind you, the town didn’t simply take its name for Montgomery County, which had been formed three years earlier and named in honor of Major Lemuel Purnell Montgomery, who was fighting with Andrew Jackson in the wars with the Creek Indians and was killed in 1814 at the battle of Horseshoe Bend. No, the town of Montgomery would claim as its namesake General Richard Montgomery, Irish born and raised and killed 1275 miles away while attacking the British fortress in Quebec, Canada in the early days of the American Revolution.
Andrew Dexter’s dream would be realized in 1846 when the Alabama state capital was shifted from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery and a beautiful Greek Revival capitol building was erected on Goat Hill. Fifteen years later Dexter’s Goat Hill would become the capital of a country when the Confederate States of America was formed here and Montgomery was its first capital city. Andrew Dexter would not be around to see any of this, however. The size of his dreams always outstripped his ability to execute them. A native Rhode Islander, he started a bank whose great success urned out to be fraudulent sending him to Canada to escape debtor’s prison. When he purchased the land that would become Montgomery he didn’t have the cash and had to borrow the money. His time in the town he founded was aswirl in debts and lawsuits and Dexter would eventually be arrested for debt in Mobile and die in prison there in 1837 at the age of 58.
His town followed a more prosperous trajectory. Montgomery was not like some state capitals where the business of the town is government. The railroad showed up early and Montgomery became a busy shipping point for cotton and livestock and dairy products. A large lumber mill was established in 1890 and the city’s industrial base quickly widened with garment factories and fertilizer plants and wholesale food concerns.
Only six state capitals are bigger, land area-speaking, than Montgomery and to get our explorations under way we will start at the Alabama River’s edge...