-
Prologue
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Prologue About a twenty-five-minute drive from Selma, Alabama, at the spot where the Alabama and Cahaba Rivers meet, lies a ghost town. Once this place was the first state capital of Alabama, but nothing is left now except some traces of streets, ruined buildings, the odd foundation stone, a crumbling cemetery. In 1819 Cahawba (or Cahaba), a piece of beautiful, undeveloped land in the valley between the two rivers, was made a gift to the state of Alabama by President James Monroe. A year later, the city was the humming center of the state. But catastrophic flooding from the rivers, plus the city’s low-lying situation, which encouraged yellow fever, forced state officials to move the capital to Tuscaloosa (and later to Montgomery ). Thus, the first city of Cahawba vanished. It had lasted only six years. But like a phoenix, Cahawba rose again in the 1850s. The city was at the center of the fertile Black Belt of the state, and as the cotton business exploded, the Alabama River became 2 · Monumental Dreams: The Life and Sculpture of Ann Norton the vital link for ferrying cotton from the vast plantations of the region to the port of Mobile. Cahawba once again flourished, at its height boasting over 3,000 residents. State offices and public buildings displayed the elegant antebellum architecture of the time along streets with names like Vine, Chestnut, and Walnut laid out in a grid, copying the venerable northern city of Philadelphia. With the arrival of the railroad in 1859, the city achieved the South’s“best and highest cultivation.” But two years after this accolade, war, rather than natural disasters, brought Cahawba’s glittering epoch to an end. Soon after the Civil War began , the Confederate government seized the railroad and tore it up in order to lengthen the main line, and in 1863 an infamous makeshift prison for Union soldiers was set up in the center of town. In 1865, while the Battle of Selma raged a few miles away, the river waters once again inundated the battered city. There were to be no more miracles for Cahawba. Within ten years, the townhouses had been dismantled or removed. A new rural community of freed slave families took up residence on the foundations of their former owners’mansions, and the Philadelphia-style streets were turned into small farm allotments. But even that transformation did not last.The conditions of the site remained unforgiving, and soon everyone was gone. There’s not much to see now. Straight, sandy roads lead to nowhere. An artesian well, an outhouse for slaves, and the remains of a church gradually arouse the imagination. Yes, this was indeed once quite a place. The most powerful remnant of Cahawba’s glory, however, is discovered almost by accident. Walk through a leafy, dark, tunnel-like pathway, overgrown with shrubs and weeds, and you stumble into a glade punctuated by three enormous, circular brick columns. Higher than telegraph poles and crumbling at the top, they stand alone in the clearing, monumental relics to a glamorous past. These columns were part of a house built in 1843 by Richard Crocheron for his northern bride. The Crocherons, a shipping family, had opened a store in Cahawba, and Richard came down from Staten Island in 1837 to help run it. His house reflected the prosperity of the time. Beautifully sited at the confluence of the two rivers, it was made of brick, with porches and big windows. The columns were part of a side portico. But when his wife died in 1850 (of yellow fever? childbirth?), Richard was so devastated that he abandoned Cahawba and returned for good to [54.144.81.21] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:45 GMT) Prologue · 3 New York with his children. After that the house, like the rest of Cahawba, disappeared. But not these three brick columns. They still stand, obstinate obelisks recalling a southern ghost story. An artist—a sculptor—on seeing them, would not be likely to forget them. ...