Alabama's Outlaw Heritage

I recently posted an article of mine published years ago about dime novels featuring Alabama train robber Rube Burrow. Some time before that article appeared, I published the one seen here that covers several of the state's 19th century outlaws including Burrow. These items were related to a book I eventually published, Criminal Activity in the Deep South: An Annotated Bibliography, 1700-1930 [1989]. 

The article below originally appeared in Alabama Living V1N4, Jan/Feb1981 pp 29-31. I covered Rube Burrow, John Wesley Hardin, Morris Slater [aka Railroad Bill] and Stephen Renfroe. 

In the near future I plan to post my article on the years Texas gunfighter Hardin spent in Alabama. And then there are some Alabama medical history articles...

My article didn't make the cover, but Miss Alabama Paige Phillips did. 

Some Family Photos Winter 1954

I've done a few posts on this blog exploring old family photographs. One included some photos taken at the Chandler Street house years after my toddler pictures below. I've also written one about a family vacation at the beach in 1956 and a group of family photos from the 1960s. 

Now we come to some examples from the winter of 1954. I turned two that March 3. Most of these photos were taken at my paternal grandparents' house at 1313 Chandler Street in Gadsden. We lived in Huntsville but visited Rosa Mae and Amos Wright numerous times over the years. 

My family is blessed--or cursed--with hundreds of photographs old and new. I'm sure I'll be exploring more subjects in the future. 

Happy, happy, joy, joy!

I was always looking at rocks or sticks. 

I don't seem quite as happy here as in the first photograph.

Here I am with dad, Amos J. Wright, Jr. He probably took most of these photos, but presumably my grandfather took this one.

I presume that photographer's shadow is dad's. Someone else standing to the right? 

Look, dad, a shadow!

Prepare to get wet, dad!

My grandmother Rosa Mae Wright died in January 1997, shortly before her 97th birthday. My grandfather Amos J. Wright, Sr., had died in 1975. These color photos were taken the day in 1997 when my brother Richard and I came to get the final items out of the house. 

Here's the back yard where we all spent so much time over the years.

Richard is standing in the driveway close to where I was standing--or sitting--in some of those photos above 43 years earlier. 

Here I am as a young sprout between my paternal grandparents, Amos Jasper Wright, Sr., and Rosa Mae Wright. I'm not sure where this photo was taken but I'm looking pretty young here; I was born in March 1952. You can see my grandparents in 1918 in this post about my grandfather's World War I training in Auburn. 

Dead Towns of Alabama: Oxanna

There once was a place called Oxanna...perhaps a town on the yellow brick road to Oz? Let's investigate.

I've written before about Falco, a pretty much dead town in south Alabama just above the Florida line in Covington County. That town rose and fell with the timber industry; Oxanna's story is a bit different. 

In 1872 the Woodstock Iron Company was formed by Samuel Noble, Daniel Tyler,, and their families to build a furnace that would produce quality charcoal pig iron in Calhoun County. The company developed the private community of Anniston to support this effort; only workers, their families and other relevant individuals could live there. By 1880 the town had a population of 942.

In the spring of 1883 the Georgia Pacific Railroad being built from Atlanta to Birmingham reached Anniston. The town abandoned its exclusivity, and Woodstock planned to sell lots to anyone. Railroad developers John B. Gordon, his brother and others formed the Southern Development, Land and Immigration Company to purchase a small valley between Anniston and Oxford. They began development of "Central City" which was soon renamed Oxanna. 

The new town was expected to have areas for business, manufacturing and residences, sidewalks, and a first class hotel. The Oxanna Tribune newspaper began publication in September 1883. The Oxanna Hotel thrived for a period until the much fancier Anniston Inn opened in spring 1885. In 1886 the town incorporated and elected a mayor and council. 

By 1900 Oxanna had reached a population of 1184; Oxford had 1372 people and Anniston had boomed to 9695. Oxanna had soldiered on, but in the following year a successful petition from Anniston citizens to the legislature resulted in annexation of the smaller town. 

Wikipedia has a list of Alabama ghost towns, but neither Falco nor Oxanna are on it. The two also do not appear in W. Stuart Harris' Dead Towns of Alabama, first published in 1977.

I wrote a blog post in 2018 "Whatever Happened to Powhatan and Praco?" that examined the fates of those now-dead Jefferson County mining towns. My mother was born in Powhatan; one of her sisters, my aunt Marjorie, was born in Praco. I've also done "Whatever Happened to Advance, Alabama?"  I plan to examine more disappeared Alabama towns in the future. 

Newspaper articles below were found via the Library of Congress' Chronicling America database. 

Further Reading

Grace Hooten Gates has written extensively on the early history of Anniston and provides some information on Oxanna in her works. Her book The Model City of the New South: Anniston, Alabama, 1872-1900 was published in 1978. Her article "Anniston: Model City and Rival City" appeared in the Alabama Review in January 1978. That article has a good account of the rivalry between Anniston and Oxanna. Another of her articles, "Anniston: Transition from Company Town to Public Town" was published in the January 1984 issue of the Alabama Review. 

Savannah Morning News 15 October 1883 

Birmingham Age-Herald 11 January 1901

During it's short life, Oxanna had its share of troubles:

Birmingham Age-Herald 29 September 1899

Birmingham Age-Herald 8 September 1900

From George F. Cram's 1904 Alabama map, which shows Oxanna as a separate town. 

Source: University of Alabama Historical Maps

And now for something completely random....

Sacramento Daily Record-Union 20 Nov 1890

Source: ebay

“Bradycrotine, the Southern Woman's Headache Cure, was made in Macon GA by Dr. Welch.”

Alabama Photos: A Mobile Youth Orchestra in 1937

I found the first photograph below in D. Antoinette Handy's Black Women in American Bands and Orchestras [1981]. Then I found it and a related photo at a web site devoted to the history of America's New Deal during the Great Depression. The photos show a girls' orchestra performing in Mobile under the auspices of the National Youth Administration. Let's investigate.

President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the National Youth Administration in June 1935 and it operated as part of the Works Progress Administration until 1939. The NYA was discontinued in 1943 as the economic effects of World War II began to take effect. The agency paid grants to young people aged 16 to 25 to assist with job training and actual jobs in public works and service projects. That web site on the New Deal I mentioned has some detail from the NYA's final report about the orchestras sponsored by the agency. 

There is another important Alabama connection at the NYA. The agency's Executive Director for its entire existence was Aubrey Willis Williams, who was born in Springville in St. Clair County on August 23, 1890. Despite his impoverished background, by the time he was 30 he had earned a PhD at the University of Bordeaux in France and begun a career in social work in Ohio and Wisconsin. President Roosevelt appointed him as Assistant Federal Relief Administrator under Harry Hopkins, an important New Deal figure and a close advisor to FDR.

When the National Youth Administration was organized, Roosevelt selected  Williams to direct it. One of his early tasks required him to appoint a Youth Director for each of the 48 states; he picked future president Lyndon Baines Johnson to head the operation in Texas. The 26 year-old Johnson soon earned a reputation for fairness that included black participation in the agency's programs. This experience may have influenced President Johnson's Great Society programs and efforts such as Job Corps and Upward Bound.

In 1945 after the NYA had been dissolved, Roosevelt appointed Williams to be director of the Rural Electrification Administration. His support of blacks in federal programs meant that Southern senators did not support him and  blocked his nomination.

He returned to Alabama to continue civil rights work, but attacks by Southern politicians who wanted to link integration and communism continued. These men included the powerful senator from Mississippi James Eastland and Governor George Wallace.

In 1945 Williams and Alabama journalist Gould Beech had purchased The Southern Farmer newspaper and turned it into a venue for liberal opinion and activity in the South. The paper eventually failed, and Williams returned to Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s. Despite suffering from stomach cancer, he attended Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington in August 1963. Williams died on March 15, 1965.  

Source: U.S. National Archives via the New Deal of the Day site

Aubrey Willis Williams [1890-1965]

Source: Library of Congress via Wikipedia

Alabama Photos: Kwik Chek in Montgomery

In going through some papers at mom's recently, I found the small recipe collection below; I've included a few sample pages. The "Kwik Chek" name was vaguely familiar, so that sent me to the research farm known as Google. As luck would have it, I turned up some Kwik Check photos in the Alabama state archives digital collections.

The site has quite a few black-and-white and color photos taken from 1954 until 1966 at Kwik Check stores in Montgomery. Most are interior shots. I've chosen just two and included them below.

Since mom' house is in Huntsville, I presume the recipe booklet came from a store there. The pamphlet is 5.5" x 3.5" and has 16 unnumbered pages. Products on the back cover are promoted in the booklet, as shown in the recipe for "Barbecued Potatoes" that mentions Mazzola Corn Oil and Reynolds Wrap. 

Several copies of this pamphlet are up for sale on Amazon and eBay, each with a different store listed at the bottom of the front cover. The one on Amazon lists the publisher as the National Broiler Council, which makes sense given the emphasis on chicken. Their logo is on the back cover of the pamphlet. The date stated for the Amazon copy is 1972. A couple of the entries on eBay claim the 1950s and 1960s. Who knows? No date is given in the booklet I have. 

I came across a 2009 blog post that places the Kwik Chek chain in "Winn-Dixie's Family Tree". Kwik Chek seems to have begun in the Tampa and Miami areas and expanded beyond Florida during its lifetime from the 1950s into the 1970s. Winn-Dixie retains the "Chek" image in it's logo and Chek brand of sodas. 

Montgomery store located at 2252 Mt. Meigs Road on 1 August 1955
Photo by John E. Scott

Source: Alabama Dept of Archives & History 

Interior shot taken by John E. Scott at the Montgomery store in the Normandale Shopping Center on East Patton Road 27 October 1960

Source: Alabama Dept of Archives & History

Remember Trading Stamps?

As we were going through some papers at mom's recently, my younger brother Richard came across these relics from the past--trading stamps. Mom was a big user of these back in the day; my wife Dianne tells me her mother was, too. The ones we found were S&H Green Stamps, Plaid Stamps [a program of the A&P company] and Top Value Stamps. 

According to Wikipedia, trading stamps were first used in 1891 at a department store in Wisconsin. Five years later the Sperry and Hutchinson Company began offering its line of stamps to retailers; by 1957 around 200 companies had entered the business. In addition to the three seen here, other prominent companies included Gold Bond Stamps and Blue Chip Stamps. In the late 1950s in the U.S. around 250,000 retail outlets were offering stamps and almost two-thirds of households saved them. Stamps could be redeemed for all sorts of products. 

Most trading stamps were given at supermarkets, grocery stores and gas stations; that practice began to decline in the 1970s for various reasons. In 2008 the last remaining company in the printed stamps field in the U.S., Eagle Stamps, shut down operations. S&H Green Stamps closed its online "Greenpoints" program in 2020 and also announced that the classic printed stamps no longer had any value.

Top Value stamps shut down in the 1980s and S&H honored them for a while. At its height, S&H had its own redemption centers in larger cities. In Alabama these centers, which were like department stores, operated in Montgomery, Birmingham and Huntsville and perhaps other locations. 

I don't remember anything specific mom purchased with such stamps, but I imagine most items were practical!

Pondering Alabama Maps (10): A Neat One from 1906

I've written quite a few posts on this blog related to maps. I've done a series "Pondering Alabama Maps" with nine entries including Pelham in 1917, 1926 and 1928; early state road maps; an 1867 railroad map, a 1913 highway proposal, and Shelby County in 1822 and 1825. I've also covered more recent state highway maps and Benton County in 1852.

So here we are again, pondering an Alabama map. As with so many things, I stumbled across this one on the Alabama Mosaic site. The map was published in 1906 by the Geographical Publishing Company of Chicago, which existed from around 1893 until 1966. Perhaps the Birmingham News was one of several clients for which the company produced similar maps. 

The map notes that the News is "Alabama's Greatest Newspaper" and has the "Largest Circulation of Alabama Newspapers." The annual subscription cost for delivery on a rural route was $3.40; by mail $5.00. I presume most sales at this time were on newsstands and from young boys hawking each day's issue on the sidewalks. 

Shown on the map are the governors of Alabama and the state capitol building in Montgomery. The map copyright is 1906, but oddly Governor B.B. Comer is included; he served 1907 until 1911. His election took place in 1906, however. 

Each county on the map includes numerous towns and cities. Naturally when I look at old state maps I look for Pelham and it's on this one, right there between Helena and Keystone. Although its growth did not begin until the 1970s, Pelham has been around since the 1870s.

If you look at this map on the Mosaic web site, you can zoom in for closer examination.