(who but a few years before had been elected President of the young
Republic, and Andrew Jackson, who in a few years more was destined to be
another of her Presidents) both bought lots in the new town, then, as
now, a goodly, fair site in the bend where the Tennessee, hugging the
Southern hills as if to escape the mouth of the foaming, passionate,
tumultuous shoals, shrinks away, and, like a beautiful woman when she
throws off her mantle in the ball room, exposes shoulders fair to see.
They were fair enough in the wilderness to stop Jackson and Madison.
Jackson must have seen the beautiful site for a city on this most
beautiful and lordly river often. On his first taste of Indian fighting
he crossed it somewhere near Florence, when pioneer Tennesseans struck
the Indian marauders who lived at the great Coldwater spring at the
present site of Tuscumbia, a few miles beyond. Later his troops crossed
it down the old military road he cut out from Nashville to Pensacola,
when they marched to New Orleans, to glory or to death. The gap in the
mountainous hills near where the graceful bridge of the Louisville &
Nashville crosses the river is still pointed out as the spot where the
heroes of New Orleans pontooned across from the mouth of the creek.
Methinks the old hero never forgot this spot—the great, splendid river,
wooded, hill-crowned, plain-girdled and thunder-foamed with the spray
from the long-leaping, shining shoals.
[Illustration: Rifle pits on hill at Florence used by Confederate
soldiers.]
He was young when he first saw it. He had made no name and no history. He
was only a common, ordinary, hot-blooded, dare-devil, cussin’, fighting
Irish boy, lank of form, peaked of face and forehead, with piercing blue
eyes, a thin, lofty, religious, idealized, hatchety head, bequeued with
bristling, sandy-red hair.
You may think I am foolish to call him religious, but be patient. A man
is born religious or not. And if born so, all his wildness and fighting
and bloodshed and profanity will not eliminate it. No man had more of
it than Jackson. He was naturally religious. Whenever the passions and
fightings of his combatitive trend and nature gave him a breathing spell
he fell back in every deed and act on the Scotch-Irish predestination
of his breeding. Mr. Eaton walked one night into President Jackson’s
bed room. He was preparing to retire. The miniature of the dead Rachel
Jackson, which he wore next to his heart, with a silk string around his
neck, underneath his clothes, lay on the table by her open Bible. He was
reading the Bible, with tears in his eyes, and by him he had her picture
to help him interpret it.
Some may not think this is religion. But it is religion of the deepest
kind.
Florence is full of history, and history that counts.
John Coffee, Jackson’s right-hand general at New Orleans, and who
married Rachel Jackson’s niece, was one of the founders of the town, a
corporation known as The Cypress Creek Land Company. The old hero lies
buried in a nearby hill. A gallant man he was, sturdy and true, and
Jackson often said that but for him at New Orleans he knew not what he
would have done. Old Hickory said that, but, rely upon it, he would have
done something just the same.
Another incorporator was Col. James Jackson, whose old colonial home
still stands at the Forks, the original plantation covering several
thousand acres of as goodly land as ever felt the pressure of a race
horse. For here it was that many famous race horses lived and bred their
kind. Col. James Jackson imported Glencoe, a horse, to my mind, greater
than any that Old Hickory or any of the Tennesseeans ever imported. Often
James Jackson would meet the Tennesseeans in fierce contests of the turf,
in the Tennessee valley or at the old Clover Bottom, and the laurels were
more often with the Alabamian.
In going through the court records, back to the old books in search
of early history of this beautiful town, I find some queer and quaint
documents. I did not search closely, but what little I did see convinced
me that James Madison must have come very near going broke on Florence.
People who are used to booms in these days of cities, railroads, mines,
spindles, furnaces and a fast-increasing population don’t know what a
pioneer boom really was. Here in the heart of a wilderness a roadless
territory, the land still flecked with the blood of the white and the
red, the nearest town a village on the Cumberland, one hundred and fifty
miles away, and only a few settlers along the bluffs of the river,
with savage Indians lurking in the interior—no peoples, no cities, no
industries—nothing but a yoke of oxen and a wilderness of uncleared land
upon which to base coupons for the future—here was a boom to make one
smile.
The lots were untouched forests jutting out on an Indian trail to the
river. And yet the one on which the present bank stands fetched over
$3,000, and the one just below the courthouse and diagonally across
fetched $1,840! Here is faith for you—here is booming that booms. If
such men as Jackson and Madison pinned their faith there like that,
in July, 1818, what splendid opportunities now offer themselves for
faith in a town which, as one stands on the hillside looking down on
the same great river, sees it covered with a cloud, not from the sky,
but from earth—from furnace and factory, and behold, the valley of
erstwhile woods, the busy mart of men in homes and houses. And two great
railroads—the Louisville & Nashville and the Southern—and one great
river, to keep freight down.
The total sale of the first two or three hundred lots was $233,580.
Andrew Jackson bought lot 6 for $350; Nos. 57 to 62, for $250 to $400.
Madison bought lot No. 28 for $300; 39 for $390; 41 to 44, $400 to $600.
Madison made his first payments, and then—let them all go for taxes!
Evidently the great expounder of the Constitution and President of the
United States took his first lesson in boom towns when Fate sent him to
the Tennessee River to close up an Indian treaty.
And he must have been easy. Oh, if the real estate agents of to-day could
always meet his kidney!
Further tracing of old records shows that he caught it all around.
November 1st, 1826, I find that James Madison appointed one Dabney Morris
his agent to handle “all his lands in Alabama, all lots in Florence,
also eight shares of stock in Cypress Land Company.” On August 22, 1826,
is an agreement in which James Madison extends the time of payment of a
judgment he held against one Bedford amounting to $4,680.96. And, worst
of all, Dabney Morris laid down on him, for later a record shows that
Morris’ notes to Madison went to protest, to satisfy which the said
Morris turned over land to said Madison to the tune of $24,866—a small
fortune in those days (in money, not in land) when money was worth nearly
double what it now is. In the slang language of to-day, they evidently
“did enough to Jimmy.”
But Old Hickory paid for his. It is not recorded that he lost a cent. Old
Hickory was born holding on. He never turned loose.
And to show what things cost in those days: On October 20, 1819, Thomas
Childress and W. W. Warner, who had been appointed to sell the effects
and settle up the estate of a deceased pioneer, report the sale of
the following: Twelve negro slaves, $4,200; five head of horses, $225
($45 each—ye gods! Evidently they were not Hals); twenty-three head of
cattle, $165 (that was before the beef trust); twenty-nine head of hogs,
$86.50; five beds and furniture, $100; two spinning wheels, $2; two rifle
guns, $22; ‘one pare saddle bags,’ $1; and five ‘setting chairs,’ $2.50
(‘setting chairs’—this was evidently the beginning of the incubator
idea). Just below it John W. Byrne sells a nineteen-year-old negro to
James Hickman for $460, whom he guarantees to be “sound, healthy, clear
of any disorder whatever.” And land sales—some of it fetched fifty
dollars per acre. That was before it was cleared, too.
It can now be bought for $10 to $25 an acre, and will raise two crops in
one year!
If there was any faith for their belief nearly a century ago, what a
chance now for the man who invests in Florence or in Lauderdale land!
* * * * *
Some months ago I found a rare old book which has afforded me a great
deal of pleasure as well as information. It is called “Letters from
Alabama,” by Anne Royal, whom it seems was a most eccentric old woman,
afflicted with a mania for writing down everything she saw or heard
(and remarkably well she did it) on a trip by stage and horseback which
she made for the purpose of seeing the new country. She left Washington
November, 1817, and reached Melton’s Bluff, on the Tennessee River, about
New Year. Her description of men and things in the new country is the
most interesting I have ever read, and the most accurate. As Melton’s
Bluff, as she called the place, is not far from Florence (I think it was
afterwards called Marathon), I will give some of her descriptions of the
new country as it looked then, six months before Florence was laid out
into town lots:
“You have heard that this country consists of table and bottom land, also
of the bluffs. These bluffs happen where there is no bottom land, but the
tableland running up to the river forms a high precipice, called a bluff.
This is the case at Melton’s Bluff, the highest I have seen. Here is a
very large plantation of cotton and maize, worked by about sixty slaves,
owned by General Jackson, who bought the interests of old Melton.
“No language can convey an idea of the beauties of Melton’s Bluff. It is
said to be the handsomest spot in the world, off the seaboard, and rich
as it is beautiful. I can sit in my room and see the whole plantation;
the boats gilding down the river, and the opposite shore, one mile
distant. The ducks, geese and swan, playing at the same time on the bosom
of the stream, with a full view of the many islands. It is, after all,
the great height of the site that pleases.
“I took a walk with some ladies to-day over the plantation, as we wished
to have a nearer view of those snowy fields which so sedulously present
themselves to our view, together with orchards, gin houses, gardens,
Melton’s mansion, and a considerable negro town.
“We approached the mansion by a broad street running up the river bank
east of the town. This street seems suspended between heaven and earth,
as the whole premises for two miles, all in sight, appears to be elevated
above the horizon, and none above the rest. We entered the courtyard,
fronting the house, by a stile; and the first thing we met was a large
scaffold overspread with cotton; as it was in the seed, there must have
been many thousand pounds. Being damp from dew, and often rain, it must
be dried in this manner. The mansion was large, built with logs, shingled
roof, and may have been built twenty-five or thirty years since. I
recoiled at the sight of a place once the habitation of such a monster
as Melton was. Some of our party went in: I did not. General Jackson’s
overseer, who joined us here, said he lived in the lower story, the
upper being filled with cotton. This scaffold was about four feet from
the ground. From this we crossed another fence, and found ourselves in a
cotton field of about one hundred acres, white with cotton and alive with
negroes. The center of this field is said to be the rallying point of
viewing the scenery, as it doubtless is. You can see up to Brown’s Ferry,
eight miles distant, with the naked eye, and the same distance down.
“The term ‘beauty’ is applied to anything which excites pleasant
feelings. Beauty is said to be a uniformity amidst variety, a proportion
of parts adapted to a whole, fitness of things to an end, quantity and
simplicity. All this is realized on Melton’s Bluff. Here is a noble river
which combines in itself all you can conceive of grandeur and utility,
adorned with islands, spangled with boats, and enlivened with wild
flowers. Lift your eye from the river, and lo! magnificent fields, white
as snow, orchards, farms and houses all in view, without moving out of
the spot. You may thus form some idea of this far-famed bluff. Here the
green islands look like floating meadows. Here the boatman wields his
mossy oar and guides his freighted boat along. Here the wild fowl arrayed
in glossy plumes, wantons as she lists. Here the distant billows breaking
o’er the shoals, echo back in murmuring sounds, and mingling sweetly
with the music of the boatman’s viol, swells upon the ear and softly
dies away upon the breeze. To crown the whole, here the majestic swan,
robed in dazzling white, moves in all her graceful attitudes. These are
beauties which may be felt but cannot be described. This combination of
objects, each beautiful in itself, and so materially useful, constitutes
the beauty of Melton’s Bluff. All the trade of East Tennessee pass by the
Bluff and halt there to take in their pilots.”
[Illustration: The Indian Mound on the banks of the Tennessee River, at
Florence, Ala.]
Can description be more beautiful? Anne Royal, whoever she was, could
write classic English for her day and generation.
From Huntsville, December 25, 1817, she wrote: “The face of this country
has changed five times in my tour. From Big Sandy river (the boundary
of Kentucky and Virginia) to Mount Sterling, the soil is black, firm,
uneven and covered with heavy timber, beech and oak principally. From Mt.
Sterling to Danville, called first-rate land, it is generally black as
your hat and the growth is locust, cherry and walnut. They continue to
the Red river, in Tennessee, one hundred miles. They are not a dead or
prairie-like level, but rather waving.
“Next to them comes on the lofty timbered black, rich soil and large
grape vines and continues to Nashville. Upon leaving Nashville the
red cedar begins and though the land is still rich, it is much
interrupted with swamps and stones. This is well watered and continues
to Fayetteville, on Elk River, near the southern boundary of the State.
There again we have the black loam and heavy timber, till within eighteen
miles of Huntsville, when the chocolate lands commence again, like the
barrens; though light, it is not destitute of timber. All of these lands
extend from the mountains on the left, to the Ohio on the right. We
forded all the rivers in Kentucky and Tennessee except Kentucky river.
The Kentuckians are the handsomest people, by far, in the United States.
They are not very stout men, but have fine features and very beautiful
complexions. The Tennesseans are not so stout as the Kentuckians, nor
so fair, but they are well shaped and more active. There is a native,
bold independence in both, with this difference: the Kentuckians are
great brags, whilst the Tennesseans, equally as brave and gallant, are
wholly unconscious of their virtues. What astonished me most was their
careless indifference on the subject of their late gallant achievement,
particularly at New Orleans. They spoke of it with perfect unconcern, and
only mentioned it when applied to, and then not half the same interest
they would show on the subject of hunting and killing deer. Not so the
Kentuckians—they appreciate their bravery to the greatest extent. The
Kentucky ladies are very large, but are fair and well featured, and
much more polished (excepting the ladies of Nashville) than the ladies
of Tennessee; but the latter are better shaped, are very artless and
the young women have a sweet simplicity in their looks and countenance.
Both men and women are without disguise, nor have they any of that
impertinent curiosity common to other States. But the most distinguishing
trait of the Tennessean is that he treats all men alike. The nabob, with
his splendid equipage, receives no more nor as much attention as the
pedestrian. They are extremely jealous of wealthy, or what we call big,
men. One of them, as I came on, being asked rather peremptorily by one of
the big bugs, to rub down his horse, cursed him and told him to ‘Do it
yourself—I am no man’s servant.’
“Last evening I had the pleasure of seeing General Coffee, the renowned
soldier and companion of General Jackson. This hero, of whom you have
heard so much, is upward of six feet in height, and proportionately wide.
Nor did I ever see so fine a figure. He is thirty-five or thirty-six
years of age, his face is full, and features handsome. His complexion
is ruddy, though sunburned. His hair and eyes black and a soft serenity
diffuses his countenance. His hair is carelessly thrown to one side
and displays one of the finest foreheads in nature—high, smooth and
retreating. His countenance has much animation while speaking and his
eye sparkles. I expected to see a stern, haughty, fierce warrior. No
such thing. You look in vain for the Indian fighter. He is as cool as a
dewdrop, but deep in his soul you see very plain that desperate, firm,
cool and manly courage which has covered him with glory. He must be a
host when he is aroused. He speaks very slowly and may weigh about 200
weight.”
From Milton’s Bluff (which she says was afterward changed to Marathon),
January 18, 1818, she writes: “Good news awaits you. Read on. Having
collected a few books in a corner I heard some one say: ‘General Jackson,
General Jackson comes,’ and running to my window I saw him walking slowly
up the hill between two gentlemen, his aids. He was dressed in a blue
frock coat, with epaulettes, a common hat, with a black cockade and a
sword by his side. He is very tall and slender. He walked on by our door
to Major Wyatt’s, his companion in arms, where he put up for the night,
though he called on us that evening and the next morning. His person is
finely shaped and his features not handsome, but strikingly bold and
determined. He is very easy and affable in his manners, and loves a jest.
He told one of our party he ‘was one of the blue hen’s chickens.’ He
appears to be about fifty years old. There is a great deal of dignity
about him. He related many hardships endured by his men in the army, but
never a word of his own. His language is pure and fluent, and he has
the appearance of having kept the best company. He has been ordered by
the government against the Seminole Indians. His army is on the march
considerably ahead of him, having crossed at Ditto’s Landing, up the
river, but he came round by this place, to see his plantation and slaves.”
* * * * *
And what of those lands to-day, and what are the inducements they offer
to the Northern farmer seeking a home in the South? Meeting a very
intelligent and reliable farmer, Mr. W. M. Sammon, who had moved from
Dalton, Ill., to Lauderdale country, near Florence, some seven years
ago, I interviewed him on this subject, reminding him that Trotwood’s
was a medium which would rather under-estimate than over-color the
picture; that a people did not take much stock in highly-colored pictures
of glorious Edens, finding them to be untrue and as such hurting all
concerned. “That is true,” said Mr. Sammon, “and well said. Many hundreds
of Northern people are misled by such statements and become disgusted
when the real facts are enough to captivate any one wishing to make a
home here. To begin with, I sold my land in Illinois at three times what
just as good, if not better, land cost me here, with three more months in
the year for working it. I found the land just as level as in Illinois,
and hence I could use the same tools I had there for corn, wheat, oats
and alfalfa. I find red clover grows here just as well as in Illinois,
and other grasses we cannot grow there, such, for instance, as Bermuda,
which will grow anywhere here and make the finest summer pasture in the
world, standing sun and drought when other grasses would die. The land
does not produce as much corn per acre as does Illinois. Corn in the
South, owing to the longer climate, goes much to stalk and fewer stalks
can be planted in the hill, but mine produces from twenty-five to forty
bushels on the upland and as high as sixty in richer lowlands. But this
is to a great extent offset by the difference in price, selling here
all the time at sixty to seventy cents, whereas in the North we do well
to get forty cents per bushel. All kinds of live stock I find do better
here, for they are not troubled with flies, and hence we have no nets to
plough under, nor screens for the house. One of the greatest problems
to the farmer in Illinois is help. Last fall a friend of mine came here
and told me he had to help his wife wash the clothes every week. I paid
$25 and board for my farm help up there, but here I get good help at
$8 to $10 and board. As for water, there is no comparison. Up there it
was ponds and cisterns, but here is a country of springs. I never saw
anything like it. Creeks, too, with beds full of gravel, which make the
finest roads in the world. It is the best watered and healthiest country
I ever saw. The water here is plentiful and easy of access.
“The greatest crop I have found here to build up the land is peas—the
Southern pea. It is equal to clover as a nitrogen producing crop,
enriching the land, and as a money-maker it beats anything in the North.
I sow peas in my corn every third row and run round it a few times. It is
laid by with the corn. I can make ten dollars worth of pork per acre in
peas and leave the land better than it was. I can raise all stock cheaper
here, even turkeys, on account of the peas and grasshoppers. There are
nine months of pasture, year in and year out. The land is not as rich as
in Illinois, but I make more, owing to peas. My clover there, I could
hardly give away, it selling at $2 to $4 per ton, but here I find ready
sale for my pea hay at $12 to $15 per ton, and raise more per acre than
clover. Wheat needs some fertilizers here, as the belt is far south, but
it produces fairly well. I find good money in raising mules. Pastures are
so cheap that they practically cost nothing. I buy western mares, good
workers, very cheap, and raise a mule worth $150 that is not housed at
all and runs in the pasture or on cane all the year.
“The climate is mild and pleasant. People have a mistaken idea as to
the heat. It is not as hot here as there, for the heat is steady, even
temperature, and a good breeze in the summer.
“I think I know when I have a good thing, and I am sorry I have not lived
here all my life. I have made more money and enjoyed better health, and
the people are kind, neighborly and hospitable. They are not after the
dollar alone.”
This is the talk of a straightforward, practical farmer, who knows what
he is talking about, and what he says the reader of Trotwood’s may rely
upon.
* * * * *
Florence is at the head of the famous Mussel Shoals, the opening of which
has cost Uncle Sam the sum of seven million dollars.
[Illustration: Where Hood’s army crossed the Tennessee River at Florence,
Ala., November, 1864.]
Uncle Sam never does anything on a small scale, and here, at
headquarters, on the banks of the clear, silver river, where seven
millions of dollars have been appropriated to unlock 660 miles of
navigable water and 1,000 miles of tributary streams, all of which had
been locked in the beginning of things and its key hidden to all save
the unconquerable spirit of American enterprise, here everything was in
keeping with the magnitude of the undertaking and the build and mold of
things. It is a paradise in the woods, an Arcadia in primeval forests.
It is strength and beauty—a touch of modern art on a background of
the antique, a background of rock and beetling cliff, in a setting of
sternest and ruggedest realism. Modern houses for offices on the brow
of a rock, whose crinkled lips smile a grim and perpetual smile, as if
enjoying the joke that a few thousand years will make in the change
of man’s baubles above it. Handsome government buildings on a level
plateau, surrounded with silence and eternal hills, which half-mockingly
look down, as if to say, “Did we not see it ten thousand years ago,
when another civilization did the same?” Steel aqueducts, leading
captive waters across Shoal creek—a tube of steel binding the waist
of this barbarian of the woods, that civilization might walk over his
breast—water flowing across water, and that below grumbling with spiteful
whirl and jealousy at the usurpation above. A rare picture of the present
and the past, of strength and weakness, of beauty and grandeur, but
above all the never-changing setting of eternal hills, and through it all
the sigh of perpetual silence unbroken by this ripple of living laughter
which scarcely touches the skirts of its dream.