Quick Visit to a North Alabama Town: Baileyton

On my trips to Huntsville to visit mom I often get off I-65 and drive through some of the back roads and small towns along the way. One of those towns on a recent trip was Baileyton in northeastern Cullman County. Baileyton is located on Alabama Highway 69 not far from Arab. 

In her book Place Names in Alabama (1989), Virginia Foscue tells us the town was named after Robert Bailey, a farmer from Georgia who settled in the area in 1870. As noted in the Encyclopedia of Alabama entry for Baileyton, Bailey also operated a cotton gin. A post office was established in 1883; the town incorporated in 1973. 

Baileyton was originally located in Blount County, but became part of Cullman County when it was created in 1877. The Alabama Official & Statistical Register gives the town's changing population over the years: 1037 in 1890, 1197 in 1900, and then as high as 2043 in 1920. The 2016 U.S. Census estimate listed 766 as the population.

Many different businesses have operated in Baileyton such as sawmills, gristmills, general stores and cotton gins. The statewide Farmer's Alliance operated a store in the 1880's. A Masonic Lodge received a charter in December 1890. Dr. John T. Winn had a medical practice and drug store from 1898 until 1936. 

In her 1972 book Combing Cullman County Margaret Jean Jones lists a number of businesses then operating in Baileyton, ranging from a supermarket to laundromats, beauty and barber shops, fabric shop, furniture store, trading stamp redemption store and a drag strip. According to Google Maps, the Baileyton Good Time Drag Strip is still operating on County Road 1719. 

Jones also discusses the Empire Nursery established by R.L. Baker north of the town in 1926. He arrived in Baileyton in 1898, but left for California in 1913 and entered the nursery business. When he returned he began cultivating and cross-breeding various types of apples and peaches and produced numerous different varieties of each fruit. The nursery operated until at least 1939. 

A one room schoolhouse opened in 1885. By 1900 fifty students were enrolled. In 1916 a two-story, four room school was built that originally included students through the eleventh grade. In 1927 that changed to the ninth grade; three years later the building was expanded when two nearby schools were consolidated with Baileyton's. Today the town is served by Parkside Elementary School. 

In 1936 a female entertainer named Sarah Ophelia Colley made an appearance at the Baileyton school. She worked for a theatrical company based in Atlanta, the Wayne P. Sewell Production Company, putting together plays and musicals for civic organizations around the South. Colley came to Baileyton to produce an amateur musical comedy, and while there met a Mrs. Jim Burden. The Burdens invited her to stay with them for a few days, and Mrs. Burden told many stories during that time. Colley repeated these to friends, who urged her to build an act around them. 

In 1939 Colley introduced her character of Minnie Pearl in Aiken, South Carolina. By November 1940 she made her first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, an association that would last over 50 years. Colley also portrayed the character on the Hee Haw television program from 1969 until 1991. Colley told the story of the character's origins on the May 1, 1957, episode of This Is Your Life. Colley died in 1995.

A few more comments are below some of the photos. 

Most small towns have a spectacular ruin or two, and Baileyton is no exception.

In April 1870 Robert Bailey purchased 40 acres of land from the L&N Railroad; Alabama Highway 69 now divides that original plot. The stone notes he and his wife were "early settlers" and founders of what is now the Baileyton United Methodist Church. They are buried in Baileyton Cemetery. 

Source: Find-A-Grave

Baileyton United Methodist Church is listed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage and the cemetery on the state's Historic Cemetery Register. 

Source: The church's Facebook page

Sarah Ophelia Colley as "Minnie Pearl" in 1965

Source: Wikipedia

A Legacy and Justice Visit to Montgomery

On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend last year Dianne, our son Amos and I made a trip to Montgomery. Our destination? Two places that had just opened the previous April 26: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Equal Justice Institute operates both facilities. The Legacy Museum covers black experience in the U.S. "From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration" as its subtitle states. The National Memorial documents the victims of lynching in the United States, a project that continues.  

As is often the case, that September day in Alabama was very hot. Yet both locations were crowded with people black and white. 

The opening of the museum and memorial attracted international attention. You can read two responses here and here. According to an email I recently received from EJI, almost 300,000 people had visited the sites by January 31, 2019. 

Further comments are below.  

Photos are not allowed in the Museum. The facility is 11,000 square feet and  was very crowded on the day we visited. People taking photographs would have been distractions from the message and perhaps disrespectful as well. Through various types of exhibits the museum describes the past oppression of blacks in the U.S. and current problems such as high incarceration rates. 

The exhibits and displays are not meant to comfort. The terrors of slavery and its aftermath of Reconstruction and sharecropping and the contemporary issues surrounding mass incarceration are vividly expressed. One display contains samples of soil from lynching sites across America. Naturally the vast majority are in the southern states. Another vivid exhibit uses video technology  and slave pen recreations for narrations of first person slave accounts. 

This pair of sites offers a very well-done and thoughtful series of exhibits and experiences. Their addition to Alabama's already impressive Civil Rights Museum Trail will bring even more  state, national and international tourists to learn the history. 

This sculpture by Dana King is dedicated to the women who sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott

The National Memorial building contains over 800 hundred six-foot long steel monuments representing each county in the U.S. where lynchings have taken place. On the grounds outside the building are an equal number of monuments that will be available for counties to claim and install locally. 

These monuments are one part of EJI's Community Remembrance Project. Other initiatives include historical markers at lynching sites and the collection of soil from those sites. 

Since we live in Shelby County, I especially noticed these names. I'll have to do some research...

Sculpture "Raise Up" by Hank Willis Thomas 

The Legacy Museum is located on the site of a slave warehouse, and is one block from the site of Montgomery's slave markets. Also nearby were the river docks and train station where tens of thousands of slaves were moved in and out of the city. 

Deb's Bookstore in Cullman

I always enjoy checking out bookstores when I travel, and recently I stopped at one in Cullman. Brother Richard and I had visited this one a few years ago, but I hadn't been back since. One day as I headed home from mom's in Huntsville, I passed by, so....

As you can see from the photos below, the place is large and packed. There are sections for biographies, non-fiction, self-help and such, but most of the inventory is fiction. Lots of fiction. There are large sections for romances, science fiction and fantasy, and --unusually--westerns. Louis L'Amour has his own section, as do Steven King, Clive Cussler, James Patterson, Stuart Woods, and others.  

The store had a website that was really just an online billboard with a video tour; it's no longer active. The Facebook page still exists. You'll just have to make a trip yourself....

Oh, the place is for sale. The owner informed me she's retiring this year and wants to sell. The price includes the building, inventory, computer system, a large parking lot and fifteen years worth of customer goodwill. 

Hmmm...

UPDATE 26 June 2021

I stopped in again and the place has indeed sold and is operating under a new name, Camelot Books and Comics. You can see a couple of signs at the end. For the most part, nothing has changed about the inventory as described above, which consist of some 250,000 items!