The Eclectic Industrialism of Antebellum Baldwin County

Longleaf pine, not cotton, was king in antebellum Baldwin County. Sawmills and turpentine distilleries dotted the landscape; lumbermen and turpentine producers dominated the society. The industrialists who pursued profit in lumber and its by-products during the peak of the cotton economy illustrate the alternate avenues to personal wealth and regional development taken by southern entrepreneurs. Astute businessmen—rarely women—they exploited southern institutions to build profitable firms, selectively buying and hiring engineers, artisans, and laborers. Many of the skilled workers they hired injected cultural heterogeneity into the rural Alabama landscape. Protestant and Catholic, they came from Germany and the British Isles, joining workers from across the country. Artisans unaffiliated with the extractive industries added their unique cultural and craft diversity to the county. With large Mobile merchant houses just across the bay, these "makers" survived by tapping niche markets and providing goods and services the merchants could not competitively match. Women, free black and white, increasingly entered the market as dressmakers, seamstresses, and workers in the service industries. Most artisans and laborers lived in rural communities surrounding the plantations and mills of the industrialists. Others clustered in racially blended communities in the county's few towns. Together these industrialists, slaves, independent artisans, and laborers sustained the industrial expansion that accompanied the cotton boom and created the eclectic industrialism that characterized antebellum Baldwin County.¹

Bracketed by the Mobile River at its western border and the Perdido River on the east, Baldwin County falls within the southeast swath of longleaf pine that defined its economic base. The county took form in 1809 by decree of the Mississippi Territorial legislature. In 1810 the legislature designated Blakeley the county seat. Alabama statehood nine years later coincided with the Adams-Onis Treaty ceding Florida from Spain, which settled the state's southern boundary. It also coincided with the economic depression known as the Panic of 1819. In its wake, national debates over the proper role of government in economic development consumed the public discourse. While debates raged, Alabama's new state legislature quietly yet aggressively funded internal improvements. Many of the recipients of their largesse were the lumbermen of Baldwin County.²

Second to structuring the state and local government, transportation most concerned the early state legislatures. In 1819 and throughout the 1820s lawmakers authorized networks of roads which, if built, would link towns from the Tennessee River Valley to Mobile Bay, supplement river travel, and make Mobile more accessible than New Orleans to planters in the northern part of the state. The roads typically intersected rivers at fall-line cities where manufacturers and merchants clustered, spurring commercial and industrial development. There planters found buyers for their cotton, warehouses to store it, and stevedores to offload it from one conveyance to another, as well as shops and hotels for respite. Before steamboat packet service became common the roads (in theory) also offered a faster route back home for Tennessee River planters who had taken the Tennessee north to the Mississippi River and then south to New Orleans. The road system not only linked towns and supplemented river ways, but it had the potential to fuel economic growth.³

With this broad goal in mind, the legislature at its first session authorized the construction of a two-leg turnpike road that began in Columbia, Tennessee, a town on Andrew Jackson's Military Road, and ended on the Tensas River in Baldwin County. From Columbia the first leg of the road veered southwest through Lauderdale County, between Lawrence and Franklin Counties, and ended in Tuscaloosa at the fall line of the Black Warrior River. Commissioners from each of the counties oversaw the road's construction to Tuscaloosa, where county court judges oversaw its completion to the falls. The legislature authorized John Byler of Lawrence County to build the road and stipulated the charges and fines he could collect. It required him and his unnamed associates to keep the road in repair and allowed them to "receive all the profits from the same, for the term of twelve years." The legislature authorized the second leg of the road in a...