The Alabama Writer Who Died in Apalachicola

OK, here's another one of those "let's figure out an Alabama connection and show some pretty pictures" posts. 

For a number of years my family has been visiting the wonderful little Florida panhandle port of Apalachicola (Apalach to the cognoscenti) and staying on nearby St. George Island. The town is full of fun shops, art galleries and even TWO bookstores as well as working shrimp, oyster and fishing boats. St George Island is half houses and half state park; the whole area is blessedly free of the numerous high rises and overbearing crowds that have ruined the traditional Red Neck Riviera from Gulf Shores to Panama City. 

Recently I was reading about Marie Layet Sheip, an Alabama author who died in Apalachicola in April 1937. In 1930, under the name Marie Stanley she published one novel, Gulf Stream, which was reprinted in 1993 by the University of Alabama Press. According to Sharon Deck's entry on Sheip in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, at the time of her death Sheip left the manuscript for another novel, "Penhazard," which her publisher had rejected.

Sheip was born in Mobile in April 1885 into a prominent city family. Orphaned when young, she lived with her maternal grandmother who was a close friend of local bestselling novelist Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. When her grandmother died, she lived with relatives in Ohio and New Jersey and studied art with William Merritt Chase before she returned to her native city at age 24. She opened an art studio and as Marie Layet wrote scripts for at least six short silent films.


In 1917 she married Stanley Sheip, member of another wealthy Mobile family. They lived on a 17-acre estate in the Spring Hill area where Marie became active in local theater and wrote poems and short stories. In the late 1920s the couple moved to Apalachicola so that Stanley Sheip could manage a sawmill owned by his family. They are listed in the 1930 U.S. census as living at 127 Bay Avenue; the house survives and can be seen below.

Sheip began writing Gulf Stream after the couple moved to Apalachicola. The novel is set in a barely-disguised Mobile and features interracial relationships and marriage. The novel received generally positive national reviews, but local blacks objected to a white author writing about their Sand Town section of Spring Hill and including much dialect. John Sledge, who wrote about books for the Mobile Press-Register for many years, published an appreciation of the novel in 2009. He called it "one of the most astonishing pieces of fiction ever set here [in Mobile]--a complex, textured and fundamentally unsettling tale."

According to a "Florida, Deaths, 1877-1939" database available at the FamilySearch genealogy site, Sheip died on April 9, 1937, and was buried the next day in Mobile. Her occupation was listed as "Housewife."

The house at 127 Bay Avenue

A street scene in Apalachicola featuring the Owl Cafe

A former ships' chandlery offers a variety of shopping

A view of the beach at the state park on St. George Island

On our last visit to the park we got to watch some mullet fishermen...

...and later I got to eat a waffle cone at the Old Time Soda Fountain in Apalachicola

We also visited Apalachicola's brewery, open about a year...

...and had some glasses full of very good beer.

One of the great places on St. George Island is Eddy Teach's

A Grapico from Gadsden

On our annual pilgrimages to St. George Island, Florida, we usually spend at least part of one day in Apalachicola. The small town is a working seaport with lots of history and charm. Most of the commercial and residential buildings date from the 19th or early 20th centuries. Naturally, the place is also full of shops and galleries, a bookstore, a brewery and such. 

On our most recent visit the week of Thanksgiving, we made our trip into town on Black Friday so our grandson Ezra could see Santa arrive by shrimp boat. Before that we did some shopping at various places including the Apalachicola Sponge Company. There I found the Grapico bottle. 

The drink was first developed and sold by J. Grossman's Sons in New Orleans in 1914. In 1917 a businessman in Birmingham, Raymond R. Rochell, purchased the soft drink's syrup from Grossman's Sons and began distribution in Alabama. By 1929 Rochell had expanded the business beyond Alabama to Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. He also began distributing Orange Crush in 1926 and 7-Up in 1933. Birmingham's independent Pepsi bottler Buffalo Rock purchased the company in 1981 and continues to distribute Grapico in the southeastern U.S. A Diet Grapico was added to the product line in 2005. 

More comments are below. You can read about some of Birmingham's other early soft drinks here. 

I bought this bottle for $8. Too bad it wasn't a little less; I'd have bought the one from Birmingham also.

Rochell's company became the Orange Crush-Grapico Bottling Company by 1953. The name was shortened to the Orange Grapico Company in July 1957, so this bottle appeared before then at a bottling operation in Gadsden.

The town has special meaning for me since I was born there. My dad was also born there, and we used to visit often until my grandmother died in 1997. 

The Orange Crush, 7-Up and Grapico bottling company in Birmingham in the 1940's. 

Photo by O.V. Hunt

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections 

"Older than dirt but a whole lot sweeter" says the company's web site. 

Got the US 231 South of Montgomery Blues (1)

Dianne and I recently made one of our trips to visit daughter Becca and her family who live just south of Jacksonville, Florida. As we also do on our trips to St. George Island near Apalachicola, we take US 231 out of Montgomery and head for Dothan. This route takes us through Troy, Brundidge, and Ozark and the rural landscapes in between. I have family connections in Brundidge, and I've written here about a trip to that town. This blog post and one that follows take a different approach.  

Until the Interstates were built, US 231 was a major artery into Florida from points north. After all it runs from US 41 in St. John, Indiana, to US 98 in Panama City. In those rural areas between Montgomery and Dothan are frequent examples old and more recent of homes and especially businesses now empty. Of course, there are some very nice farms, cattle ranches, homes and landscapes along this stretch also.

The photos below were taken mostly between Montgomery and Troy from the car as we headed southbound. Another post will have photos from the return trip northbound. I've put comments below some of the photos. 

Based on our soundtrack, many of these pictures were taken between Bob Dylan's "A Satisfied Mind" and his "Shelter From the Storm" on one of the Sirius XM channels. I leave readers to work out the significance of that. 

I wonder how many Coca Cola signs adorn abandoned businesses across America. 

This Athey Road is located in Mathews in Montgomery County. The community is unincorporated and named after George Mathews, a Revolutionary War hero and Georgia governor. The post office closed in 2011. 

One of a series of signs advertising a store coming up on the route. You still see this sort of thing along routes like U.S. 231 that were heavily traveled in the past; the Interstates are devoid of such colorful campaigns. Perhaps the most famous of the type were the legendary little poems for Burma-Shave.

This place seems to be attracting customers. 

These are the sad remnants of Pioneer Village near Troy, not the Pioneer Museum of Alabama which is a bit further south and still thriving. I assume it's the business listed by Bizapedia: "Pioneer Village, LLC is an Alabama Domestic Limited-Liability Company filed on August 19, 2005. The company's filing status is listed as Exists and its File Number is 467-846. The Registered Agent on file for this company is Johnson, James Ralph and is located at 26001 Us Hwy 231, Troy, AL 36081."

I don't think the business operated long but have no further details. Perhaps it did not survive the 2009 economic downturn. 

Is it just me, or does it seem hypocritical to brag about the beauty of your campus on a gigantic roadside billboard that spoils the view of the sky??

Kentucky Fried Chicken on the hill!

One of many small churches you see along the highway.

We passed Continental Cinemas heading into Troy.

History to the right, the present up ahead....

Pioneer Museum of Alabama

Yes, you pass some kudzu on this route. 

Troy, oh boy!

A lot of history in Ozark, Ariton and Enterprise. For instance, Ariton is the birthplace of blues singer Big Mama Thornton, who in 1952 became the first to record Leiber & Stoller's legendary song "Hound Dog". 

Ah, the open road...where are Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady when you need them?

The entrance to Troy University's Dothan campus 

I'll end this post where I began, with a shot of some pretty landscape.

A Parade of Alabama T-Shirts (3)

OK, here's the final part, I promise. Part 1 and part 2 cover other shirts. I am happy to be able to record all these for posterity. Or something. A few comments are below.

Birmingham was one of the venues hosting men's soccer games as part of the 1996 Olympics based in Atlanta. The image above and the two below were used as part of the advertising leading up to the games.

When the kids were much younger and still at home, we often went to Gulf Shores on vacations. We stayed on the Fort Morgan peninsula at the Gulf Shores Plantation Resort. One thing we really enjoyed about the place was the large indoor pool, which was a lifesaver for all of us after a couple of hours in the hot summer sun. We spent more time at that pool than we did on the beach. In the early years the place featured the Cabana Cafe, a small but funky bar and eatery near the beach. 

The Plantation was about halfway between Gulf Shores and Fort Morgan and fairly isolated at that time. The last time we were there six or more years ago, other developments had sprouted up around it. The overbuilding and traffic hassles from Gulf Shores to Panama City is a main reason we have moved east to St. George Island and Apalachicola for so many vacations in the past twenty or more years.

I covered a bit of the family and organizational history of the Birmingham Youth Hockey League in Part 1. This shirt promoted a tournament the BYHL hosted.

In Part 2 I included a t-shirt that featured the UAB bookstore, and here's another. I recently had to get rid of a UAB t-shirt that my wife Dianne bought for me when I started working there in 1983. Now THAT would be a real antique. 

I'll close this review of my Alabama t-shirt collection with the best one of all!