Drama in "Pokerville", Known to Us as Wetumpka

Although born in London in 1810, Joseph M. Field came to America at a very young age and remained here until his death in 1856. In 1827 he began an acting career in Boston, but three years later left the city looking for better opportunities. By 1833 he was in the Old Southwest touring with Sol Smith, the co-manager of a theatrical company that worked large cities such as New Orleans and Mobile and many small towns along the routes. Both men published accounts of life on the theater circuit in the U.S. and especially in the Southeast and Alabama. 

Smith published his book Theatrical Management in the South and West for Thirty Years in 1868, the year before his death. I plan a blog post in the future on Smith and his career. In this post let's look at Field's The Drama in Pokerville, published in 1847.

Field's book falls into a genre of literature known as Old Southwestern humor that was popular in the antebellum period before the Civil War. The Old Southwest consisting of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas was America's Wild West at the time. The sketches and tales embracing this humor featured regional dialects and portraits of the many con men, gamblers, confidence artists and other criminals as well as their victims inhabiting the cities, towns and roads of these states. Also skewered are the pompous airs and prejudices of residents. 

The authors portrayed many denizens of the region as exotic, exaggerated types often lazy or crooked whether white, black or Native American.Two of the best known works in the genre originated in Alabama: Joseph G. Baldwin (1815-64), The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853) and Johnson Jones Hooper (1815-62), Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with "Taking the Census" and Other Alabama Sketches (1845).


Thus Field unlike Smith turned his experiences into humorous fiction. The Pokerville "drama" takes up almost half the book. In his essay on Fields in the Encyclopedia of Alabama Charles S. Watson summarizes the Alabama connections. "Pokerville probably is based on Wetumpka, Alabama, where Field had performed in a two-week theatrical run in a billiard room. Two stories about Sol Smith's company are specifically located in Alabama. "'Old Sol' in a Delicate Situation" takes place in the Mobile Theatre, and "A Night in a Swamp" describes Sol Smith's company en route from Georgia to Montgomery as they pass through the Creek Nation in Alabama. In The Drama in Pokerville, Field ridicules the pomposity of local social leaders and censures small-town prejudice against the theatre."

The brief excerpt below gives a taste of Fields' biting, sarcastic humor--and ridicule. A poster is printed advertising "The Great Small Affair" drama and attracts much interest since there is a "great desire" to have a theater in Pokerville. The town already had several brick stores, was situated at the "head of navigation" and located "somewhere, on the 'Big'--something" and thus bound to prosper. The nearby larger town of "Coonsborough" [Montgomery?] already had a theater. But there was a "heap" of taste in Pokerville, and the manager of the theatrical troupe could make "a corde of money" there. Fields' tongue is firmly in cheek during these and other observations.

He observes that Pokerville had no theater as yet, but did have three taverns, thirty-three bar rooms, a billiard room and a ten-pin alley. At least priorities were in order. I suppose the time had come for a little culture!

As you can see from the table of contents included below, Fields devotes a lot of attention to the doings in Pokerville surrounding "The Great Small Affair". You can find the book and enjoy more of his Alabama portrait here. 

Fields died in Mobile on January 28, 1856. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Daughter Kate Fields, the only child of Joseph and his wife Eliza, became a journalist and lecturer. She is also buried in Mount Auburn along with both parents.

An illustration from Pokerville

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama

Morrione Vineyards in Wetumpka

In cleaning out some stuff at mom's recently, I came across this bottle in a box  of other wines from California and Tennessee. These bottles have been at her house for probably 15 years; she's not much of a wine drinker. They were all purchased sometime before dad died in 2003 and never opened. 

Alabama currently has a pretty robust wine industry. The North Alabama Wine Trail includes six wineries. I found this 2013 posting from the Wine Nomad on wineries in the Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile areas. At that time there were eight wineries in the state. This search at the state's official travel site will pull up links to wineries, wine festivals and wine bars around the state. 

Morrione comes up on none of those searches. If you Google "Morrione Vineyards" you will get some results but all are seemingly out of date and consist mostly of an address and phone number: Location: 3865 Central Plank Rd, Montgomery Alabama Telephone 334-567-9957. Often "U-Pick" is added to the name. You can see that location on a Google satellite view. That phone number seems to be no longer in service.

I'm not really a fan of sweet wines, but my paternal grandparents in Gadsden  had a fence in their back yard loaded with muscadines each year. Whenever I visited for a week in the summer I'd practically make myself sick eating them. Ah, the muscadine days of yore....And did you know there is a community named Muscadine in Cleburne County? 

I presume this winery is now defunct. Anyone who has further information is invited to leave a comment to this post!

Finding Alabama in Oklahoma

Recently Dianne and I helped our daughter Becca and son-in-law Matt move from Tuscaloosa to Edmond, Oklahoma, where he has accepted a faculty position at the University of Central Oklahoma. Matt and his father took the U-Haul; Dianne and his mother drove one of their cars; and Becca and I drove the other one, the one with their two dogs. We left Tuscaloosa around 6:30 am and arrived in Edmond about 13 hours later. 

As we made our way across Oklahoma on I-40, Becca and I noticed something familiar. We passed an exit for "Eufaula." Some miles further on we passed an exit for "Wetumpka." This Twilight Zone feeling quickly passed as we realized why there are towns in Oklahoma with names so familiar to us in Alabama.

Those Alabama towns of Eufaula and Wetumpka carry names associated with settlements of various Muscogee/Creek tribes in the state. Several towns by those names were identified by early European traders and settlers in the area. For an in-depth look at such matters, see Amos J. Wright, Jr.'s 2003 book, Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838.

In the 1830's the Creeks---along with Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws and Seminoles---were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast to the Indian Territory in the west. Naturally, some of their town names went with them. Another such name was Tuskegee, now an Oklahoma ghost town. 

Below are three maps. The first one shows the locations of the two towns south of I-40. Downtown Wetumka [without the P] is shown on the second map. There we can see some specifics that would not be out of place in its Alabama counterpart: a Diary Queen, a Dollar General, Wetumka Elementary and High Schools. Oh, wait---that Cowkickers Smokin Barbeque gives it away. You seldom see a barbeque place in Alabama that doesn't use Bar-B-Que in it's name. 

If you look at the water near Eufaula on the third map, you'll see Lake Eufaula there in the middle of the Canadian River. It's a reservoir created by a dam. Gee, isn't there one of those in Alabama, too?

These names are not limited to Alabama and Oklahoma. There is an unincorporated Wetumpka in Florida. A town of Tuskegee in Tennessee associated with the Cherokee and the birthplace of Sequoyah was covered by water in the 1970's after the construction of Tellico Dam. Alabama actually had several settlements by that name; see the book cited above. 

On our trip we also passed an exit for "Prague." And yes, the town was settled in the early 1890's by--wait for it--Czech immigrants.