The WPA Guide to Alabama

The Camellia State

Federal Writers' Project

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781595342010
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.The WPA Guide to Alabama takes the reader on a journey of through the heart of Dixie, from the Gulf coast to the rich Black Belt region and the scenic Cumberland Plateau. First published in 1941, the guide goes beyond the popular images of cotton fields and plantation houses of the old south and brings to light the "magic” of Birmingham’s burgeoning manufacturing industry, the vibrant university life in Tuscaloosa, and, in Mobile, the cultural diversity of Alabama’s port city. The guide includes striking photos of Southern poverty during the Depression.

PART I

Past and Present

Alabama Old and New

TOO often vaguely thought of as a “land of cotton,” of stately mansions and Negroes singing in the hot sun, Alabama is in reality a region where sharply contrasted influences have shaped the manners and customs of the people. While in some sections Alabamians still hold to the pattern of tradition, in others they have turned almost vehemently from any link with the past.

A stranger will be told that all Alabamians are cut from the same last and are much like other Americans, except that practically all of the white voters are Democrats. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the life of the Appalachian mountaineers has nothing in common with the cosmopolitan culture of the Gulf Coast, and that Alabamians of industrial Birmingham are no more like those of the agrarian Black Belt than Pennsylvania miners are like Iowa wheat farmers.

The section of Alabama that comes closest to the conventional picture of the Deep South is the Black Belt, that amazingly fertile central area where the planter class ruled a kingdom founded on cotton and slaves. This is a leisurely and friendly land. Many of its families still live on ancestral plantations; the young men go to the South’s best colleges and the girls seem always to play the role of charming Southern belles. Here are the big-houses built before “the War,” noble structures epitomizing an age of culture and social splendor. Here, too, are the share-croppers’ shacks, the fields of cotton, the cities from whose river wharves cotton was shipped down to Mobile.

Selma, on the Alabama River, important transportation point in steamboat days and arsenal of the Confederacy, is now a fascinating mixture of old and new. Historic homes and modern bungalows stand side by side. There are railroad shops and factories, and on Saturday farmers from the surrounding countryside come to town to sell their produce and do their weekly shopping. At the fall line of the Black Warrior River is Tuscaloosa, home of the University of Alabama and the State capital from 1825 to 1846. Many of its beautiful homes were built during this period, and cotton barges and steamboats made regular trips to Mobile. Today, the Druid City—so-called because of the century old water oaks that line its streets—is crowded from fall to spring with young students who pass in and out of the stately university buildings; there are iron works, brick plants, and other industries; as in Selma, Saturday is market day for the nearby farmers.

Cotton and rivers were the foundations upon which Old South cities were built. Montgomery, capital of the State and “cradle of the Confederacy,” is still flanked by cotton fields and the Alabama River—formed by the confluence of the Coosa and the Tallapoosa six miles away—flows past the business district. The white domed Capitol on Goat Hill looks down on the beloved landmarks of earlier times, on the impressive buildings that house present-day government activities, and on textile mills, tile plants and other signs of industry.

Although the planters no longer govern the State, their free and easy ways still set the tone in State politics. Informality is the rule at the capitol and no cordon of tight-lipped secretaries guard the door of the Governor’s office. Politics is the Black Belt planter’s major hobby and he considers it almost a duty to come to Montgomery while the legislature is in session. There he talks endlessly about cotton and politics, politics and cotton. The politicians, even today—perhaps through force of habit—play up to the planters, embellishing their speeches with flowery phrases and bristling personalities.

The Black Belt had more than 70 per cent of Alabama’s slaves, and Negroes now outnumber the whites by a four-to-one ratio in some counties. Relations between the two races remain pretty much what they were in the old plantation days. Many Negroes work for the same families their forefathers served as slaves, and most of them depend upon some white man or white family for advice and guidance in everything they do. Only in this part of Alabama does one find the deep South conception of the old-fashioned Negro; that is, a Negro who has had a minimum of schooling, who removes his hat and usually steps aside when a white person passes, and who is still ruled by racial customs and superstitions. The Black Belt Negroes believe in voodooism, which they call “hoodoo” or “conjure.” They keep alive the exploits of Bre’r Rabbit, telling gleefully of his unending triumphs over Bre’r Fox and Sis Cow; they sing jig tunes and devil tunes, and the old mellows or spirituals as they were sung before their “discovery” by the musical world.

To pass from the Black Belt north into the Birmingham region, is to move from one world to another—from a section characterized by a culture based on landed aristocracy and caste to an industrial area that is hard-cored and straight-hitting. These two sections were until recently the storm centers for the agrarian-industrial struggle for political control.

Birmingham, industrial hub of the State, larger by nearly 200,000 than any other Alabama city, is perhaps the most unsouthern of southern cities. This is New Alabama. Jones valley was quiet farmland until two railroads met there in 1870 and a city was born. Its early tales of land auctions and meteoric business careers have almost a western boom-town flavor. Rich deposits of iron, coal and limestone—the ingredients needed for making steel—lie close together here. The name Birmingham stands for much more than the actual city; it stands for a vast area of mines, iron furnaces, steel mills, and ore belts—the major iron and steel-producing center of the South, and one of the greatest in the world.

Birmingham people are a new type of Southerner. They are not so much concerned about where a person was born and what his grandfather did at Shiloh and Gettysburg as about his political opinions and how much money he has. The city is made up of people drawn from all parts of Alabama and many parts of the Nation, and is both a sophisticated metropolis and a big country town. Symphony concerts and all day “sings” are equally popular; crowds hurry and jostle, but they will lay aside their “northern impatience” to stop and watch a Negro boy dancing on the street.

The Negroes of the Birmingham district are better off, socially and economically, than Negroes elsewhere in Alabama. The steel worker and the miner are the aristocrats of Negro labor and they seem to have given to others of their race a new pride and independence that lessens to some extent the weight of color prejudice. Jim Crow laws are as strictly enforced in Birmingham as in other sections of the State, but here the Negro seems to accept them without humility. He has his own theaters, pool parlors, lodges, and cafes, and his end of the street car is as comfortable, if not as commodious, as the other. Birmingham’s “Cohentown,” described by Octavus Roy Cohen and making every effort to live up to his description, is an autonomous, self-respecting Negro community.

The old and new are intermingled in the valley of the Tennessee River that flows westward across the northern part of the State. During Alabama’s early days rich slave owners settled here to grow cotton, and the lavishness of their life equaled that of the Black Belt planters. Today, the Tennessee Valley Authority is harnessing the river with great dams to create electric power, blasting roads into isolated mountain sections, and restoring the worn-out soil. In Huntsville, Florence, and other cities of this section are stately public buildings and private mansions to remind the visitor of a glamorous past; Saturday crowds of farmers, trading and sitting in the shade on courthouse lawns to talk politics and crops; and mills, factories, and thriving business districts. The activities of the TVA and the recent development of industry has brought many newcomers to northern Alabama. They have widened the horizons of its cities, fostered a brisk atmosphere that has not so much destroyed the old way of life as changed the accepted social pattern.

The mountaineers in the northeastern part of the State, where the spurs of the Appalachians jut down from Tennessee and Georgia, do not fit into the popular Deep South picture. To this region came hardy pioneers, who built their pine-pole cabins and scratched small crops from the narrow clearings. They held the rich planters in contempt because they were unwilling to do manual labor. The mountaineer of today scorns the thought of a Negro hand helping him at any task. Independent and reserving the right to be guided wholly by his “self-made notions,” he closely resembles the mountaineers of Tennessee and Kentucky. He lives in a “dog-trot” cabin in which much of the furniture is homemade; his clothes are plain and cheap, and the mail order catalogue is usually just a “wishin’ book.” Meal is waterground and corn whisky is charred in oak kegs without benefit of excise tax. The Alabamians of this region hunt with “rifle-guns” and even the poorest among them keep one or more hounds for running foxes.

The mountaineers’ language, like that of their Tennessee neighbors, has its source in Shakespeare’s England and flows with the rhythm of the Bible. Swerve is always swarve, help is holp, wrap is wrop, and the past tense of climb is clumb. A salad is a sallet, a handkerchief is a handkercher, and the minister preaches a sarmont on Sunday morning.

To a lesser extent a similar independence and pioneer tradition prevails in the Red Hills country northwest of Birmingham and south of the Tennessee Valley. Before and during the War between the States this section was sharply divided in its sympathies, and its men-folk held to their right to choose between the North and the South. Here is the rugged county of “free Winston,” that once threatened to secede from Confederate Alabama and form the independent state of Nickajack. Like the mountaineers, most of the Red Hill Alabamians are descendants of small farmers who had a deep distrust for the aristocratic planter class. Recent industrial development has brought to this section people from other parts of the State and has somewhat changed its distinctive characteristics.

The Wiregrass lands in the southeastern corner of the State are almost entirely free of old Alabama tradition. The people here do not have the mountaineers’ prejudice against the planters, and they are not involved in the agrarian-industrial political struggle. This flat area, dotted with stands of pine, was thought to be of little value in the days when agriculture meant cotton, for it was comparatively poor land for that purpose. Some cotton was grown, but the region did not prosper until diversified crops and industries dependent on them were introduced. Peanuts, corn, watermelons, dairying and hog raising are now the agricultural mainstays of the Wiregrass and such industries as peanut oil and peanut butter processing flourish. Typical of the region is the town of Enterprise, with its peanut festival and its statue honoring the boll weevil because it spelled the doom of cotton and forced the farmers to grow crops more suitable to the soil. Much of the pine has been cleared, but what remains is used for lumbering and turpentining.

The Cajans, a group of mixed and undetermined racial origin living in the pine woods north and west of Mobile Bay, also carry on turpentining and lumbering, but with more meagre returns. Entirely unrelated to the Louisiana Cajuns, who are descended from the Acadians of Canada, the Alabama Cajans claim descent from early French, English, and Sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• General Information
• Calendar of Annual Events
• Part I. Past and Present
• Part II. Courthouse Squares
• Part III. Tours
• Part IV. Appendices