Archelus H. Mitchell & His 1916 Anesthesia Machine

On July 21, 1916, Archelus H. Mitchell [1892-1986] of Selma submitted an application to the U.S. Patent Office for an "anesthetizing and resuscitation apparatus." At that time such applications typically included drawings, a detailed description and the inventor's claims to uniqueness. Witnesses to his application were listed as N. Wann and F.C. Meyer. You can see his application below.

In his description Mitchell noted the machine included two mixing chambers, wash bottles, control valves for air, oxygen, and whatever anesthetic gas would be used--primarily ether or nitrous oxide at that time in the U.S. The machine also included a mercury manometer to measure pressure. He made five specific claims of uniqueness for his machine related to the specific parts and operations of the device.

On August 14, 1917, Mitchell was granted patent number 1,236,591. Anesthesia machines first began to appear in the late 19th century and offered greater control over administration of gases, oxygen and air for general anesthesia. You can learn more about the history of anesthesia via the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology which is located near Chicago.

Whether Michell's machine was ever manufactured is currently unknown. In fact I have so far learned very little about Mitchell. The dates given above are taken from an entry in the Social Security Death Index; I assume it is the same person, since the dates and location fit. There his birthday is given as September 1, 1892 and his death as January 1986.

The listing for Mitchell's household in Selma in the 1930 U.S. Census shows four people in addition to Mitchell himself. His sister Addie lived with him, as well as three boarders, two female and one male. His occupation is listed as "proprietor" and his industry as "farm implement." Thus we can probably conclude he owned a store specializing in farm equipment.

In 1932 Mitchell filed one more patent application, for a "motor vehicle". He was granted patent number 1,924,787 for that truck. The patent has been cited by several others between 1948 and 2008. What he did in Selma for the rest of his long life is currently unknown.

Text and illustrations for patents can be found easily in two places: Google Patents and the European Patent Office The latter site offers access to more than 80 million worldwide patents since 1830, including U.S. patents, and printing as PDF files. The Google site is U.S. only. Happy hunting!

You can learn about more Alabama inventors at the Birmingham Public Library's "Alabama Inventors" digital collection. Those include Mary Anderson, who invented the windshield wiper, and Miller Reese Hutchinson, who held 1,000 patents.

A Brief History of Pelham High School Football

SEE updates at the end of this post.

            Supporters of football at Pelham High School were no doubt disappointed by the team’s 3-7 finish in the 2014 season. Yet that record has an historical connection; the school’s very first team also finished 3-7.

           Pelham High School opened in September 1974 and fielded its first football team two years later. The first game was played at Shelby County on Saturday, August 28. The schedule that year included several teams each from divisions 3A, 2A and 1A. Pelham’s three wins all came against 1A opponents: Maplesville, Thorsby and Verbena. The losses included a 35-6 one to a 1A team, Isabella. Pelham’s other lopsided losses that season were all to 3A teams: Shelby County, Childersburg and B.B. Comer.

            David Bailey was the head coach of that first team, and he coached three more seasons. His 1979 team finished 5-5, thus becoming Pelham High’s first team with a non-losing season. In his one year in 1980, head coach Steve Rivers’ team also went 5-5. Pelham did not have a winning season until a 6-4 campaign in 1986 in Billy Tohill’s fourth season as head coach.

            The school’s most successful coach has been Rick Rhoades from the 1996 through the 2000 seasons. He posted a 41-19 record and playoff appearances each year.

                Details of all Pelham High School football teams and many others around the state can be found on the Alabama High School Football Historical Society web site . A history of Pelham football through the 2022 season by David Parker is available on Amazon. 

UPDATE December 12, 2017: Pelham High School football team finished the 2017 regular season 5-5 and lost 49-14 to Spanish Fort in the first round of the AHSAA Class 6A playoff. Nevertheless, the team improved greatly in coach Tim Causey's third year. In 2015 the team went 1-9 and 2-8 in 2016. Pelham football's all-time record through 2017 is 203-239-0.

UPDATE December 4, 2018: Improvement continued this season as the team finished the regular season 7-3. The Panthers did lose to Hartselle 35-7 in the first round of the playoffs. The season was the first winning one since 2013 and their first seven win season since 2013. 

UPDATE August 30, 2019: At a game against Bibb County Pelham honored 1988 graduate and head football coach at Clemson Dabo Swinney. 

UPDATE November 1, 2019: Pelham finished the season at 3-7, but managed to win three of its last four games. 

UPDATE November 12, 2020: Pelham finished the season with a final record of 8-3. The season ended with the team at 8-2 with losses to Oak Mountain by seven points and Homewood by two points. The team was 6-0 in region play and won the region title for the first time since 2006 and only the third in school history. In the first round of the state playoffs Pelham lost 23-21 to Lee-Montgomery. In the final regular season standings Pelham was ranked #11, just six points behind Eufaula. 

UPDATE November 8, 2021:  Pelham finished the regular season with a 7-3 record, which included a final game win over Homewood 10-7. Pelham won it's last four games,  and that last win on October 28 was the first one over Homewood in eight years. Pelham lost in the first round of the state playoffs, 20-6 to McGill-Toolen.

UPDATE February 20, 2022: On February 11 Head Coach Tom Causey, who had coached the Panthers for seven seasons and was a head coach in Alabama since 2000, announced his retirement. Details are here. 

UPDATE February 20, 2023: Pelham made the 6A playoffs in the 2022 season and won its first round game over Northridge 44-14. That was Pelham's first playoff win since 2006. The team lost in the second round to St. Pauls, 38-7. Pelham had finished the regular season with a 5-5 record under first year coach Mike Vickery. 

UPDATE 2 November 2024: Pelham finished the season with a 1-9 record. 

Falco, Alabama, in June 1942

Alabama has a long history related to the forest products industry. One of the earliest water-powered lumber mills in the state was the one established by Thomas Mendenhall in south Alabama. The community around that mill became present-day Brewton. Because the Conecuh and Escambia rivers gave access to Pensacola Bay and export markets, the lumber industry in Alabama near the Florida border expanded quickly.

The small town of Falco in western Covington County is another example of a town made by timber. The name is a shortened version of the Florida-Alabama Land Company formed early in the twentieth century to take raw timber to market. A post office was established in the town in 1903.

Falco can still be found on some maps today on the Falco Road [County Road 11] just north of the community of Wing. The location is southwest of Andalusia in the southern part of the Conecuh National Forest. The zip code is 36483; Google Earth shows only a few buildings there.

In June 1942 photographer and future anthropologist John Collier came through Falco and took the 10 photographs below. From 1941 until 1943 Collier worked first for the Farm Security Administration and then the Office of War Information. Thus the pictures were taken as part of his work there.

These photos were taken from Yale University's massive digital collection of U.S. government photographs taken by numerous photographers during the 1930's and 1940's. Quotes under the photos below are taken from descriptions on that site. That collection includes more than 200 photographs Collier took in Alabama. How his trip took him through Falco is unknown; perhaps he was on his way to the Farm Security Administration's Escambia Farms project in northern Florida where he took photos in the same month. 

Also shown below is a much earlier photograph of the Falco railroad depot and an extract from a 1905 Alabama map showing Falco. In 2002 the Andalusia Star News published an interesting article about the history of Falco. The article notes that the lumber mill burned in 1925 and was not rebuilt. The town declined and the post office closed in 1950; only one general store and a school still operated at that time. A few years later the school closed. 

U.S. Post Office in Falco in June 1942, "one of the few buildings left"

"Falco was a thriving, overcrowded town in the twenties. Now most of its buildings have been fired or torn down, so that today it is only a post office and a crossroads."

Grist mill which has been grinding corn for eighty years

Another interior shot of the grist mill

An exterior shot of the grist mill

"Former offices and home of the owner of the Falco lumber mill which was the largest mill in northern Florida [near Alabama border], but ceased cutting in 1923." Falco is so close to the Florida state line that captions for these photographs by Collier say "Falco, Florida [ie, Alabama]." The photographer may have thought he was in Florida when he took these pictures.

"All that is left of the railroad line running to the Falco lumber mill, as it crosses the old log pond (mill closed in 1923)"

 "Mill pond of the Falco lumber company twenty years after the last of the logging"

"Only the charred foundations remain of the Falco lumber company mill, fifteen miles from Escambia Farms. Once the largest lumber company in northern Florida [i.e., Alabama near Florida border], it passsed out of existence in 1923 because of the depleted timber due to unplanned cutting."

Another exterior shot of the grist mill

Falco Railroad Depot, ca. 1917

Source: Florida Memory

From a 1905 Geographic Publishing Company map of Alabama

Source: UA's Historical Maps of Alabama Digital Collection

Birmingham Photo of the Day (27): Hotel Hillman in 1908

As the BhamWiki article notes, construction on the Hotel Hillman was completed in October 1901. Until the original Tutwiler opened in 1914 it was the city's showplace hotel. Located on the corner of 4th Avenue North and Nineteenth Street, the Hotel Hillman building remained until 1969. The BhamWiki article has a link to a Google Earth view of the site now--a parking lot. That article also has photos of the hotel around 1906 and 1926. This photograph comes from the wonderful 1908 book Views of Birmingham. The title page and a link to the book are below.

The hotel was named after Thomas T. Hillman, an executive of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. As I have discussed in a previous blog post, he was a driving force behind Hillman Hospital.  

This book was published in 1908 and can be found online via the Internet Archive. 

A Vintage Valentine’s Day in Birmingham

            Although it began as a religious event in the early Christian church, Valentine’s Day in America is now associated with romantic love and commercialism. This transformation began in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century; the type of greeting cards we know today began then and there. These  cards appeared in the U.S. in the late 1840s. Wikipedia has an extensive article on the history of Valentine’s Day.

            By the late 1800s newspapers and greeting card companies made a big fuss about February 14. We can find local evidence in the newspapers being published in Birmingham at the time. For instance, there is an obligatory “origins of Valentine's Day” article that appeared in the Birmingham Weekly Age Herald on March 1, 1893. Oddly, that paper—and perhaps others of the time--seemed to publish materials related to the day even AFTER February 14.

            The Weekly Age Herald ran a local, anonymously written gossip and happenings column signed by “The Woman About Town.” On February 17, 1892, her column included the following:

                Valentine's Day! Ah, the thought means much to some. There is a racy little story going the rounds regarding the fatal day.
              Certain cards have been received bearing the name of a young woman, with bows of yellow, pink and blue. On one is written:

"If to me your heart is true,
Send me back my bow of blue."

On another:

"If you are some other girl's fellow,
Send me back my bow of yellow."

And the last:

"If I'm the girl you wish to wed,
Come and bring yourself instead."

Comments are unnecessary.
There are few who will believe the above is true, but the fact remains the same. The young woman did send them. THE WOMAN ABOUT TOWN

            Ah, the racy days of 1892 in Birmingham….

            Even then, not everyone seemed happy with the state of Valentine’s Day. On February 22, 1893, the Weekly Age Herald inserted this sentiment as a filler item into one of its pages: “As Cervantes killed knight-errantry by his Don Quixote, and Dean Swift put a quietus on the marvelous tales of Gulliver's Travels, so the comic valentine has destroyed the sentiment of St. Valentine's Day. Oh, ridicule, how much mischief is done in thy name!”

             From the Victorian Era into the 1920s, our ancestors might have exchanged some of the cards below. These and many other wonderful vintage Valentine’s Day cards in the public domain can be found at http://www.squidoo.com/valentines-images  Issues of the Weekly Age Herald can be found online in the Birmingham Public Library’s Digital Collections at http://www.bplonline.org/resources/digital_project/

Happy Valentine’s Day!

This item first appeared on DiscoverBirmingham in February 2014.

Birmingham Photos of the Day (26): Ramming the Earth in 1936

In 1936 seven houses were built in the Gardendale "district" as part of a demonstration program by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The houses remain in the unincorporated Mount Olive community next to the suburb of Gardendale north of Birmingham. Each house had enough land for gardening and small numbers of livestock. Each house was built using the "rammed earth" method.

This building technique is ancient  and involves mixing damp earth with such stabilizers as sand, gravel and clay into a frame using pressure to create walls or blocks. Many such buildings around the world have survived for thousands of years.

The seven houses in Mount Olive are still standing. In 2009 an article at AL.com described the houses, their history, and included a photo of one of the houses. The article notes that each one-story house had about four acres and 1500 square feet of interior space.

The article identifies the architect on the project as Thomas Hibben. I have been able to find very little about him; one site devoted to rammed earth construction also identifies him as an engineer. Another site notes the project was so successful it attracted visitors from around the world, including Nehru from India. 

Twenty-six photographs of the project taken by Hibben are available on the Yale University site devoted to photographers working for U.S. government agencies in the 1930's and 1940's. Ten of them can be seen below. One photograph of a rammed earth house on that site was taken by Arthur Rothstein during his April 1937 visit to Alabama. I have talked about other Rothstein photographs in three previous posts on this blog. The Hibben photographs are all labeled with just a year, 1937.

Is a Florida Highwayman Hiding in Alabama?

Back in the day, before development forever changed much of the Florida panhandle, my father and his parents would make annual pilgrimages to a small fishing village somewhere further down that part of the Gulf coast. My mother thinks  the spot was Cedar Key, which in the 1940's and 1950's would have been tiny and away from it all. Pretty much still is, I guess. Not long after my parents married and when I was just a young sprout, there was an infamous family trip to wherever this fishing haven was. But that's another story....

If it was indeed Cedar Key, that's a nice touch. When he left Texas in the 1870's on the run from the Rangers, gunfighter John Wesley Hardin left New Orleans and landed in Cedar Key before making his way to Gainesville. He spent a couple of years hiding in Pollard in south Alabama before the Rangers finally caught up with him in Pensacola in August, 1877. But that's another story... 

Anyway, my grandparents were going to Florida in the mid-1950's when a group of African-American artists began to sell their quickly-done landscape paintings from the trunks of their cars in towns and along the tourist highways. Many were also sold door-to-door. This group of 26 individuals has since become known as the Florida Highwaymen. Alfred Hair, one of the group's original members, died in 1970 and their heydey seemed over. 

The art languished until Jim Fitch, an art historian, discovered it around 1995, and published an article about the artists. Journalist Jeff Klinkenberg also wrote several articles for a St. Petersburg newspaper about that time. More recently serious interest in the art and its creators has developed. There is even a Wikipedia page, for goodness sake. Several other pages on the web are here, here and here. Gary Monroe has just published a book on the group's only female member, Mary Ann Carroll. That work follows several others he has published on the Highwaymen. PBS broadcast a documentary in 2008. The art is now often identified as "folk" or "outsider" art.

Most of the artists were self-taught; mentoring by other group members was common. Inexpensive boards became their canvases; crown molding painted for an antique effect often framed the works. Most of the paintings featured Florida landscapes.

For years the painting below hung in a storage room my grandparents had as part of their garage and carport in Gadsden. When it came time to clean out their house, I took the work that no one else wanted. The piece remained in one of our basement closets until the Basement Event That Shall Remain Nameless last April made me take another look at it.

I remembered having read something about the Highwaymen years earlier, and this painting had the same bright colors, interesting details, cheap canvas and crown molding frame. Nothing on the painting itself or the back indicates anything about the artist or gives other information.

Is it a Highwayman piece? Who knows? The scene doesn't seem quite "Floridian". When I saw it often as a kid in that carport storage room, I thought it had a vaguely Asian feel. Did they have log cabins in China?

I'm not sure any of the actual Highwayment operated along the Panhandle; the east coast of Florida would have offered access to many more tourists in the 1950's through the 1970's. Perhaps it was painted by someone immitating their style.

Anyway, it's a colorful painting and for now it continues to hang in one of our basement closets. Maybe one day another child will re-discover it.