The South at Work: Observations from 1904

Progress as Noted in Rural Alabama

Progress as Noted in Rural Alabama Many Changes Observed Where Few Were Expected A Sympathetic Study of a Small Neighborhood—“Athens of Alabama”— The Surprise of a Former Resident When Marion Is Revisited—Thrift Evident on Every Hand—Farmers Learning Modern Methods of Transacting Business—Some Changes Which Are Not Improvements [Special Correspondence of the Transcript] • Marion, Ala., March 26. Ipse sedes revisit laetas, sed eheu! eas conspicit tamquam paene peregrinus.1 This looking at familiar scenes with the eyes of a stranger is not a mild experience. There is always imminent danger of a shifting of one’s point of view. This little town was probably one of the last places in the South to accept new conditions and rise to new demands and opportunities. Since I began these wanderings, I have several times thought of it as a place which I might present for a contrast with what I have elsewhere found of change and newness. But no: here also are many changes—and I cannot rejoice in them! Published in the Boston Evening Transcript, April 2, 1904. 56 Progress as Noted in Rural Alabama True, there is still but one slow train a day in each direction on the little branch railroad which runs eastward twenty-eight miles to Selma and westward , past Greensboro, eighteen miles away, to a junction with the Queen & Crescent line at Akron.2 Neither is there to be found here any cotton mill or other new industrial establishment.But they have actually put in use a curious invention called the telephone. One sees electric lights on the streets. I am told that there are “water-works.” This morning, in the old Court House, a lot of school teachers, some prominent citizens, and perhaps a hundred farmers from the country-sides—it is Saturday, and the streets are crowded with country folk,white and black—have been listening intently to several speeches on education and the need of better common schools. Instead of prohibition or a few secluded grog-shops on the side streets—the two arrangements which formerly alternated regularly, at intervals of six or eight years—there is a dispensary.3 Worse still, they have changed nearly all the signs on the business street, there are new names and new faces everywhere. There are even some new houses and new fences, and on one at least of the old houses there is a new front-porch and a fresh coat of paint. It is all very well to talk about progress, but isn’t this taking the thing a little too seriously? But they can afford these luxuries, I suppose. There are two banks now, instead of one, and the president of the bigger tells me that the farmers hereabouts are better off than ever before. Out in the country also, they are mending fences and painting houses. Heightened by the immemorial suggestions of the spring time, the budding out of new life from an old stock is presented here scarcely less convincingly than in Virginia and the Carolinas. It is all the more convincing because, through the rise of Birmingham and the development of the mineral region, this part of Alabama has been drained both of money and of men. Of the people who were living here twenty-five years ago, and who still survive, at least half must now be living elsewhere. Many of them I shall find at Birmingham and the other towns of the Birmingham district. A considerable number are in Texas. Of those who have taken their places, the majority come from the hill country above here. It is their names one sees on the signs.The old names keep their places only on the gravestones of the little cemetery. Is it permissible to speak of graveyards when one has just been talking about new things and a new life? An hour spent in this one might well become a thoughtful review of a great part of Southern history. Here are the same names one finds on the older gravestones in the older towns of the States along the Atlantic coast. Now and then one reads of services rendered in the Revolution by men who afterwards journeyed across the mountains Progress as Noted in Rural Alabama 57 and lived and died here. Many more were soldiers of the Confederacy. A simple cross commemorates those Confederates who fell on distant fields and whose bodies were...