2021 quick trips

The town of Blakeley originally was a riverside trading center founded in 1814. At its height, it was one of Alabama’s largest cities; today all that remains is glimpses and suggestions. The earliest inhabitants were a native group from Florida called the Apalachees who established a village here. Later, British and Spanish colonial era settlers farmed the property before it came under American control after the War of 1812. Let’s take a look first at what would have been the town in the first third of the 1800s.

Just around the bend from the town is this path to Mobile Bay. No wonder this was a perfect place to have a trading post.

We’ll learn more about the history of this town later in this post, but first let’s look at what was here back in the early 1800s.

Just past the welcome sign is the Jury Oak Pavilion. Court was held under a large oak tree; now all that’s left are the remains of this tree.

This view gives us an idea of how large the oak was. See the building in the rear of the picture? That’s where we going next.

This is the site of the old courthouse that replaced the Jury Oak.

The foundation of the courthouse and the jail are from around 1820 and are preserved under this wooden shelter.

This is the site of the county’s first courthouse.

Before this building was constructed, court sessions and other county business were conducted in several locations within the town of Blakely.

While the courthouse was authorized in 1820, it wasn’t built until around 1833. This 2-story brick building had a jail on the bottom floor with office space on the upper floor. It served as the seat of county government until 1868 when officials named nearby Daphne the county seat.

The site was excavated in 2011 by the University of South Alabama Center for Archaeological Studies. They discovered a distinctive herringbone pattern on a brick floor. that we’ll be able to see.

The following map was produced during the Civil War and shows the location of the Courthouse in relation to other structures at the time.

The map described it as being 200 yards from the landing and underneath the branches of Live Oaks. The 2-story brick building was painted white and had a room in the basement that served as a jail.

The foundation shows the herringbone pattern done in brick.

commercial businesses

Across the street from the courthouse are 3 businesses under 1 roof.

Rows of closely-situated, narrow, wooden buildings, such as those in the previous picture, could be found in towns throughout the region in the early 1800s.

Founders saw this town as a regional center for commerce because of its strategic location. By water, the town provided access to the entirety of the Tombigbee and Alabama River systems. By road, it was the end of the roads leading east to Pensacola and north to the heart of Alabama’s prime agricultural regions. Many of the early residents came here to take advantage of this location. By the early 1820s, some 25 merchants were operating in the developing town, offering everything from hardware to groceries.

In 1818, in 16 separate buildings, 23 merchants served the community.

Shop owners received much of their goods from ship traffic connecting the northeastern United States and the West Indies. Merchants from New Orleans and Mobile also provided goods for the shelves of Blakeley stores.

Groceries, housewares, clothing, fabrics, tools and building materials, and other supplies and equipment were available for Blakeley residents according to advertisements in the city’s newspapers.

houses

Whenever I see homes built in the early 1800s, I’m shocked at how modern looking they are. These people knew how to build homes for themselves.

The framework of the Mott House in the following picture is named in honor of Gabriel F. Mott, the publisher of The Blakeley Sun and Alabama Advertiser and owner of a local printing office.

the Mott House is an example of other homes that would have been built here.

The structure is based on the William Travis House that was built around 1820. The single-story home features beaded clapboarding, a gable roof, end chimney, and an interior subdivided into 3 rooms.

The interior space of such homes would probably have asymmetrical, rectangular rooms. The floorplan known as “Hall and Parlor” was common in colonial-era dwellings and stayed popular as a home style into the 1800s. The larger space would be a living room and the smaller areas would be bedrooms.

other houses in Blakeley

Researchers really don’t know what the dozens of homes in and around Blakeley would have looked like in the 1810s and 1820s, but they do know what houses at that time looked like.

Most of the houses here would have been wooden-framed structures with clapboard siding from the local sawmills (the first business usually built in a new town).

The current style of time was a Federal design and many of the town’s residents would have been from New England states where the style was popular. Adaptions for the hot, rainy weather probably included wide galleries and steeply pitched roofs.

The popular Federal style featured symmetry, flat facades, and delicate design details.

The Pope Mansion from around 1815 is one of the oldest Federal-style buildings in the state.

The Dellet House from around 1835 is one of the few surviving examples of Federal-style architecture in southwest Alabama.

The Bishop Portier House in Mobile dates to the 1830s and is a surviving example of Creole Cottage architecture popular along the Gulf Coast.

So what is a creole cottage architecture style? Here’s some information from Wikipedia.

“Two features of this style of house are thought to be influences from other places in France’s former colonial empire. The full front porch is believed to originate from the Caribbean islands, while the high gabled roof, the ridge of which is parallel to the street, accommodating the porch as well as the mass of the house, is thought to be of French Canadian origin. In the earlier or more fundamental examples one or two main rooms may open directly onto the porch. They often feature an interior chimney that pierces the ridge line of the roof, with back-to-back fireplaces serving two rooms. Two common secondary characteristics of this style are a raised basement and the frequent situating of the front of the buildings at the property line.”

pavilion

In a nearby town, the Swedish Evangelistic Mission Congregation built its church in 1903, and its members served the community for almost 75 years. When the community built a new church in the late 1970s, Historic Blakeley State Park founder Mary Grice worked with the church leaders to have the old church structure moved here.

The move required the structure be partially dismantled and reassembled on site. The Army Air National Guard brought in the steeple as part of a training exercise.

However, while moving the structure, an accident resulted in irreparable damage to the building. This pavilion was designed and built to accommodate and preserve the steeple.

town’s history

Now that we know a little of what the town would have looked like, let’s look at its history.

Blakley once competed with Mobile for the status of queen city of Lower Alabama.

Blakeley was named for Connecticut native Josiah Blakeley who planned the town on a tract of land he purchased from an early settler. Blakeley had settled in Mobile around 1806 when the area was still under Spanish control, and he was able to buy several thousand acres of property in the delta region.

Blakeley believed the natural deep harbor at this site would allow better shipping than the much shallower port at Mobile. Shortly after the area came under American control in 1813, he hired a surveyor to plot his town and then began selling the first lots.

While the town was formally incorporated in January 1814, Josiah Blakeley died in 1815 before he could see his dreams fulfilled.

rise and fall

In 1817, the Mississippi Territory was divided into the state of Mississippi and the Alabama Territory. When Alabama became a state in 1819, Blakeley had a population growth. At least 2000 people lived in or around town by the mid-1820s, about the same size as Mobile. The seat of government for Baldwin County was here in 1820, and for the next 2 years it was designated an official port of entry for the United States.

During its heyday, the town boasted a newspaper and several stores and hotels. Some of the earliest steamboats operating in the sate were also built here.

A couple of factors led to Blakeley’s decline. First, real estate prices soared because of speculation by investors and navigational improvements that had been made to the Mobile harbor and few could afford to move here.

Second, the environmental setting that gave Blakeley its early prosperity also spelled its doom. The swamps of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta filled with mosquitoes spread deadly epidemics of yellow fever and malaria. Massive epidemics swept the antebellum town, killings scores of residents and driving others from the lowlands.

Residents of the time didn’t know the source of such fevers and blamed them on the “bad air” of the vast wetlands. Once the true cause was discovered, malaria and yellow fever were virtually eradicated, but by then the town of Blakeley had been reclaimed by the forest.

The community remained the county seat for Baldwin County until the 1860s even though it was effectively a ghost town by the 1840s.

hanging tree

This tree was not only the site of the first hanging in the early Alabama town of Blakeley, but it was also where future hangings happened when cases ended with a sentence of public execution.

earlier inhabitants

The site of Blakeley had seen important settlements for thousands of years. Native Americans settled here more than 4000 years ago to hunt, fish, and gather food from the rich delta. The early Native Americans gave way to French settlers who lived here after Mobile was founded.

The Christian Apalachee, a Native American group that converted to Catholicism, came here after the British-led Creeks destroyed their mission villages in Florida.

Their village was here just 50 years prior to the founding of the town of Blakeley.

This powerful tribe traced its ancestry back to the prehistoric peoples that occupied what is now northern Florida and southern Georgia. In the 1600s, they allowed Spanish priests to establish missions in their towns and many converted. During Queen Anne’s War (1702-13), fought between Britain, France, and Spain for control of the North American continent, raids by the British and their Native American allies severely disrupted life in Apalachee communities.

In a series of raids known collectively as the “Apalachee Massacre,” British-led forces destroyed several towns, killed hundreds, and enslaved over 1000 people. Survivors fled northern Florida in 1704 and 1705. French officials at Mobile encouraged Apalachees from modern-day Pensacola to settle in Mobile Bay area. Villages were established north of Mobile and here at what became Blakeley.

When France ceded its holdings in this region to Britain following defeat in the Seven Years War (just before our Revolution), the Apalachees abandoned this location to establish a new settlement in French-held territory along the Red River in central Louisiana where a few hundred descendants remain today.

The Apalachees’ legacy survives in the form of place names, including the nearby Apalachee River. Bayou Salome that runs through the park and empties into the Tensaw River just north of where we are is named in honor of the wife of a chief of the Apalachees in the mid-1700s.

The Apalachees played an important part of life in the Mobile area. As practicing Catholics, they had their own chapel and priest, participated in St. Louis Day celebrations, and the baptism of their children was recorded in the local diocese registers.

What is the St. Louis Day celebration? It’s the feast day of their patron saint, St. Louis IX of France, that started in Texas and is still celebrated today. I couldn’t find out how this celebration got to Mobile Bay area.

They traded traditional pottery (copies of European-style earthen wares) and various foodstuffs that they grew on their farms to the French colonists.

delta info

The Mobile-Tensaw Delta is an expansive region of wetlands featuring numerous waterways draining one of the largest river systems in the eastern United States. Covering an area over 40 miles long and on average about 10 miles wide, it includes approximately 200,000 acres of some of the least disturbed natural environments in all of Alabama. It is the second largest delta in the country after the Mississippi.

The delta has thousands of acres of open water consisting of rivers, creeks, bayous, and lakes. Also in the delta are marshes, swamps, grass beds, and forests.