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The county’s historic markers are still out there. I’m still out there, pedaling around to see them and take pictures, just because they are there and I can do it. There are just six or seven more, after today’s pair.
This tree is important. Why is this tree important? You will find out here.
There are two buildings here. This one is where the historic event happen. The second is the building named after one of the players in this part of the story. Click here to find out all about it.
There are four entries on the marker site for you to check out today. First, there’s The Bottle, which is one of those first curiosities you see in town if you come by a certain route.
Across the street is just a regular convenience store. On the sign you learn there that The Bottle, a place with a great deal of character to it in the old roadside Americana vein, burned in the 1930s. What’s there now is the most Alabama thing you could possibly do with the space. See more about The Bottle here.
See more about ths Rosenwald school here. The schools were named for Julius Rosenwald, president and later chairman of Sears Roebuck & Co., who, along with Booker T. Washington, started the program. There were more than 5,000 Rosenwald schools built nationally and a few hundred of those were established throughout Alabama. This was the first one. To read more about the Alabama version, click here. You can see a slightly better version of the photo in the marker here.
And just down the road from that is the Loachapoka Historic District. It was a railroad boom town, which meant it was also a railroad bust town. There are two markers within a few feet of one another here.
It’s a sleepy little piece of sand now. You can see the markers here. Also, in the local Native American dialect, Muskogee, Loachapoka means “turtle killing place.”
American holly, Ilex opaca, in Auburn, Alabama.
That’s outside Telfair Peet, the theatre building. We were there for a show tonight. If you’re in or near Auburn you need to come see this show this weekend.
Dr. Tessa Carr, who wrote and directed the show, is a friend of ours. We’ve been talking about this performance for months. It sounded great and played even better. Go see “The Integration of Tuskegee High School.”
What Tessa wrote about this show gets right to the point of the performance:
All of the players are college students. And in every show I’ve seen they always do a great job, especially when you consider the demands on their time. And even moreso in this case, some of the actors and actresses aren’t theater majors or have never been on stage before.
Also, I know some of the people being portrayed in the play, and know most of the names of the rest. A few of them were in the audience. That must be wild, to see yourself portrayed on stage.
They’re doing a Q&A after the show, and that’s worth hearing, particularly when the people who lived in those moments are there to take part. But the show itself, the show is powerful and terrific.
UPDATE: They’ve uploaded the full show. It is full of important history lesson that we should remember, lest we forget:
I’m working on wrapping up a project I’ve been undertaking, more off than on, for several years. I’ve been riding my bike all over the county to photograph the markers and the places they document. The ones I’m showing you today are all from the same place. So important is this location, there are three markers within view of one another.
Three signs in all, six sides of information, generations of families and leaders and history. Interesting how cemeteries are both the beginning and end of history.
You can see the other sides to these signs, and the sacred grounds they mark, here.
I have to finish this project up and, so, for the next several weeks I’ll be sneaking in a few posts that will shoot you over to my historic marker page. The concept there is pretty straightforward. I’ve been riding my bike all over the county to photograph the markers and the places they document. This has been an on-again-off-again project for years. Time to wrap it up. Here are two that will get us a bit closer to doing just that.
This is a superlative sign. It is the most difficult one in the county to get to. It was one of the hardest ones to find. Being from 1954 it is perhaps the oldest of the bunch. It has perhaps the widest ranging actual historical significance. And there’s less at this physical location than any other marker in the county. There’s absolutely nothing there:
You can see the other side, and the locale.
After France, late in the Colonial period gave all of this region to Britain surveyors marked the boundaries including this one in south Smiths Station. This line goes all the way across at least two states. I wonder if there are other signs elsewhere on this line.
Also, 18th century surveyor still sounds like an impossibly difficult job.
I had a professor once who explained that the railway switch that was located just down from this sign is why all of this is here. And then he’d walk you through a few decades of railway history and it made sense. And now the town which grew beside the railroad became a city and then a blue collar town and then it dried up and now it is making a comeback. And that’s about 100 years of history.
Click here to see the other side of the sign and a lot of the locale.
