ON CREATING AN EXHILARATING NEW VISION OF ORIGINAL TUSKALOOSA

When Bev invited me to speak to y'all, I told him my subject would be the story of Tuscaloosa's original street grid. I plan on showing you today how this matrix of thoroughfares which was imposed upon this landscape 203 years ago beacons you to get out of your Lay-Z-boy, to walk outside and to use your own two legs, along with your historical imagination, to make a geographically and psychologically meaningful connection to this land with your feet. Take a journey through time. Follow your bliss. Awaken your wonder. Like Matt Clinton said, "You have history at your doorstep." If you live in the original city, your own front door is your gateway to the past. Experience the timeless treasure that is Tuscaloosa. It's not a timelessness like seeing the vast exposed rocks of some deep canyon but two hundred years of human activity along organized routes of commerce are inviting you to take everything you have learned about Druid City history and reimagine it as you walk the sacred ground of Tuscaloosa's sidewalks. Mapping this old town with your feet should find you approaching each corner, each brick wall, each alleyway, each stairway and asking yourself the same question, "What happened here?" Your feet can transport you to the sights, sounds and smells of daily life from the lost civilizations which have occupied the same public property that all of Tuscaloosa citizens have owned and have been able to enjoy 24 hours a day/7 days a week for the past two centuries. Challenge yourself to learn more about the place you call home and to make each walk a learning crusade as you reimagine Tuscaloosa's streets. 

I left my hometown of Dothan in '68 and came here to go to the University.

 

There aren't many places in Alabama as far away from Tuscaloosa as Dothan so I was 18 years old before I ever had the opportunity to set foot here. I had no familial connections up here but I'd heard about Tuscaloosa all my life. When I was a little boy growing up, folks used to tell me all the time, "Bob, if you keep actin' that way, they gonna send you to Tuscaloosa." so I guess the home folks were right because not only did I fit in with Tuscaloosa but I was the man for the job because I ended up working at both Bryce and Partlow. 

Old Tuscaloosa, one of the few places where the nuts chase the squirrels.

This is my kind of place: a drinkin' town with a football problem!

About 20 years ago, the Tuscaloosa News had a promotion where they asked their readers to write the paper and tell them why you loved T-town. 

 "I 💗 T-town" bumper stickers that were part of the promotion.

I sent in an entry and it was the last one of all the ones they published and I liked that.

 It went like this:

Standing on an old street corner laid out in 1821 

Shaded by Druid oaks all around.

That's why I love T-town.

Sitting on a sandy bank

With my feet in the river

While the sun goes down.

That's why I love T-town

Now that I've entered retirement, the "Why I love T-town" composition I wrote over 20 years ago summarizes my idea of a "perfect day." 

 Spending my day walking the old streets of T-town and,as the sun goes down, heading to the river to feed the fish. That's my idea of a perfect day and I've taken that love of the Druid City and applied it to my daily hikes so that each journey out my front door becomes my own historical scavenger hunt as I scour the town in search of clues to whatever purpose I choose to apply myself on any particular day.

 I thank the Good Lord for allowing me to live this long and even though my old body's givin' out on me and the Lord's about to call me home, I still hope I'm granted a few more days and nights to walk T-town's streets and to explore its river banks and swamps.

I've been pretty serious about learning as much as I could about Tuscaloosa's streets and buildings since the publication of a little book printed in 1978 called PAST HORIZONS along with Matt Clinton's work. Seeing as how next year the United States will be celebrating our semiquincentennial or 250th anniversary, it'd be a good idea to put out a new edition of PAST HORIZONS along with the republication of Matt's stuff.

 

I'll never forget getting out my notebook and making an 1820s page and an 1830s page and an 1840s page and so forth and going through PAST HORIZONS and listing the buildings as to their construction date.  https://reclaimalabama.blogspot.com/2023/06/post-will-be-dedicated-to-collecting.html

That's when I figured out how to read Tuscaloosa addresses. I found as I walked down the street, the number of the avenue you crossed as you headed west or the number of street you crossed as you headed south along an avenue determined the first house numbers for each address on the next block. I also found that the even numbered addresses were always on the north side or the west side of the street.

Almost 25 years ago I saw how I could sell a half-page of advertising in Old Tuscaloosa Magazine by drawing a downtown street map locating Tuscaloosa's antebellum houses. 

 That was the beginning of my historic Tuscaloosa scavenger hunts.

 55 years of calling Tuscaloosa home have shown me that for myself, the path to peace of mind leads outside my front door to the sidewalk in search of the ghosts of old Tuscaloosa  I know they are waiting to impart their wisdom to me on every corner of this old town

Even though the Devil's Dictionary's definition of a pessimist is "a well informed optimist", I do consider myself an optimist and the very first part of the OPTIMIST'S CREED says something like "I promise myself that I will be SO STRONG that NOT A DAMN THANG is gonna disturb my peace of mind TODAY!" 

Now, there's nine or ten more parts of the OPTIMIST'S CREED but that first one is enough to challenge me but..

How do I quiet my mind to be so strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind?

  That "old street corner laid out in 1821" would be part of Tuscaloosa's original street grid, virtually unchanged for 203 years, which was carved out of a wilderness by the order of President James Monroe five years after the Indians lost their title to the property in 1816. The land had been reserved from public sale because the federal government wanted it subdivided into a town which would stand on the south bank of the Black Warrior River.  The one square mile township section on which the streets were platted was located on the spot where navigation on the river ended and a series of rapids prevented further navigation north from the Gulf.  The main street in old Tuscaloosa, now called University Boulevard, ran parallel to the river from the southwest to the northeast along the crest of the hill that rose up on its south bank. About midway along the path of this main Street and perpendicular to it was Market Street, now called Greensboro Avenue, which ran south from the river wharf up the river hill to the southern margin of the Old Town. All the other streets in Old Town ran parallel to either Main or Market Streets.

 By roaming, sauntering, meandering, patrolling, roving, tramping and just walking along the sidewalks of old Tuscaloosa for me "old Tuscaloosa" is the original fractional section subdivided into city blocks in 1821 with the section's boundaries on the south side of the Warrior River being present-day Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (formerly 32nd Avenue and before that West Margin Street) on the west, 15th Street,

The origin of Tuscaloosa's original street grid is an 1821 subdivision of the south fraction of Section 22 from Township 23 South, Range 10 West.

This land would eventually be named Tuscaloosa, the Indian name for the Black Warrior River. The east, west, and southern boundaries of this fractional section come down to us in the present day with Queen City Avenue, 15th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard which run along the section lines of a piece of land that covers less than the 660 acres contained in a square mile because it's only a fraction of township section.

 The northern part of the section lies north of the river with its northwest corner monumented near where the present-day Northport levee runs near the M & O trestle. On the 1887 Tuscaloosa map, these streets that run along the section lines are called East Margin Street, South Margin Street and West Margin Street.

The oldest Tuscaloosa street map I have found is on the 1835 John LaTourrette map of the State of Alabama and West Florida.

  In late 1887, the name of East Margin Street was changed to Queen City Street and the name of South Margin Street was changed to Crescent City Avenue. The city made this change to promote the recently improved railroad connection between Cincinnati and New Orleans which was called the Queen & Crescent Route.

Most of the street names on the 1887 map were changed to numbers in 1901 by order of the U.S. Post Office so the city could get free mail delivery but our numbered streets had English names from 1822 until 1901. The only major change I found during that time was that 21st Avenue was named ADAMS STREET on the 1835 LaTourrette map and it's called COLLEGE STREET on Wellge's 1887 map.

Old Tuscaloosa consists of about one hundred two acre city blocks. With the exception of some irregular blocks at Old Town's boundaries, each block is 330 feet long and 264 feet wide and contained exactly two acres of land. Each of these identical rectangles of real estate was originally divided into 4 identical half acre lots. The incredible symmetry of Tuscaloosa's 1821 town plan was due to Henry VIII's need in 1534 to sell all the land he'd seized from the Roman Catholic Church in England. The Catholics owned one fourth of the cultivated land in England and King Henry VIII needed to sell it off quickly to get money to pay his debts and to fund his wars so he chopped the land up into little squares he called acres so folks would know how much land they were buying. Therefore, all the measurements needed by the surveyors to map Tuscaloosa's city plan 200 years ago were established and standardized over 500 years ago in England by old King Henry VIII so the king could immediately sell all the land he'd stolen from the Catholics. 511 of these half acre lots were auctioned off at the first 1823 Tuscaloosa land sale and in the present day, every title search for every subdivision of land in Old Town went all the way back to that first land sale 200 years ago.  

Like I said earlier, Tuscaloosa doesn't have the same timelessness as the Grand Canyon or Zion National Park but, nevertheless, the old town of Tuscaloosa has a timelessness. Within the two centuries that this tract of land has been occupied, nothing has interfered with the rights of property, the plan of the town or the rights of the inhabitants to use the public streets. When you cross the 99 feet of pavement of an T-Town Street, you walk across a space that was cleared by enslaved people two hundred years ago, maintained by enslaved people for decades and traveled upon by the descendants of those same enslaved people on the same day that you are crossing the street. For two centuries, if you ever wanted to see some results of slavery, all you had to do was walk the city streets of Old Town Tuscaloosa. 

From the moment the right-of-ways of Tuscaloosa's streets were opened to traffic in the 1820s, they were given names like Adams, Madison, Monroe, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, all of whom were men who commented upon the evil of slavery. Tuscaloosa even has a Union Street but over one hundred fifty years ago, all those street names couldn't stop some of Tuscaloosa's citizens from conspiring to split the nation's churches, the nation's political parties, and finally it's government. Even the names of Tuscaloosa's streets are daily reminders of its citizens' heritage.

TILDEN PARADE 1876  https://bamamammoths.blogspot.com/2024/08/november-13-4-grand-jollification-torch.html

https://bamamammoths.blogspot.com/2024/05/blog-post_21.html

HORNET ROW https://reclaimalabama.blogspot.com/2023/02/blog-post_9.html

A visitor from Cleveland, Ohio in 1884 accurately described Tuscaloosa's founding:  

"The site for this contemplated city was exceedingly well chosen and the fathers are entitled to credit perhaps I should say the father for our Uncle Samuel selected the locality and engineered the city reserving from private entry or public sale upon the usual terms a goodly tract of land which was sold off only in town lots to people who were sagacious and farseeing and desired a pleasant and salubrious locality in which to drink their mint julips and entertain their friends while their faithful retainers toiled in the cotton fields far down the fertile valley below the town. They were good people as the world went then, those planters of the olden time, albeit they differed from us of the North as to some essentials of a Christian life and they are good people today such of them as are left and very creditable representatives of the great American nation and I think they were never so bitter at heart toward their brethren of the North as were some others in less favored localities who had really less to lose by the upsetting of old usages and the liberation of the slaves.

"The town was regularly laid out by competent engineers who had an eye to the picturesque and magnificent and the streets were plotted with reference to the requirements of a to be renowned seat of government. Since land was of no great consequence in those days it was allowed that 132 feet was none too wide for the streets and now that the sidewalks are bordered with rows of mighty water oaks from two to three feet in diameter with a central row down the middle of each principal street it does not appear that the fathers of the city miscalculated matters nor were otherwise than level-headed folks."

 

 New York DAILY GRAPHIC, May 29, 1874

...Tuskaloosa, the ancient capital and present literary centre of the State, and formerly one of the most beautiful cities in tho country. The once princely dwellings enshrined among the magnificent forest trees now show too plainly that the wealth that once made them so attractive does not now exist. The hospitality of the people is nevertheless unbounded, and the entire party unanimously declared that they never had experienced better treatment.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME.

Why am I not surprised? About what? Why am I not surprised that with all the HYSTERICAL COMMISSIONS, museum "curators", "patriotic" organizations, "preservationists", "civic" organizations, "historians" and "social studies teachers" in this PITIFUL world, I AM THE ONLY SOUL WHO RECOGNIZES THAT 200 YEARS AGO TODAY, on Monday, DECEMBER 23, 1816, the first legislation to establish a state government for the people of PRESENT-DAY ALABAMA was read on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. (that should give you an idea of just how well your "ALABAMA BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION" is progressing)
A BILL TO ESTABLISH THE TERRITORY OF MOBILE
December 23, 1816
Read twice and committed to the committee of the whole House, on the bill "to enable the people of the western part of the Mississippi Territory to form a Constitution and State Government and for the admission of such State into the Union on an equal footing with the original States."
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015010692468;view=1up;seq=28

The Pleasures of Hope: Part 1

The Pleasures of Hope: Part 1 by Thomas Campbell - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry

At summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering bills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky ?
Why do those clifts of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near ?—
'T is distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
Thus, with delight, we linger to survey
The promised joys of life's unmeasured way;
Thus, from afar, each dim-discovered scene
More pleasing seems than all the past hath been,
And every form, that Fancy can repair
From dark oblivion, glows divinely there.