A recent installment of a long-running local history and nostalgia column took Mobile readers on a detour through the city’s past, mixing colorful personal recollection with an open question that historians say is trickier to answer than it sounds.
The column recalled a colorful character known only as “Bobby,” a self-described hustler who was said to have haunted the old Mobile Greyhound Bus Station in its heyday. Bus stations of that era were, in cities across the country, gathering points for a cross-section of urban life, and downtown Mobile’s station was no exception. For longtime residents, the mention of the station is itself a marker of a downtown that looked very different from today’s version, before decades of redevelopment, highway construction and suburban growth reshaped the city center.
The column also waded into a long-simmering local puzzle: the exact location of Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff. The bluff holds an outsized place in Mobile-area history. It is generally understood to be the site where French colonists established a settlement in 1702, more than a century before New Orleans existed and years before Mobile itself moved to its current location on the Mobile River. That 1702 settlement is also credited with hosting one of the earliest Mardi Gras celebrations in what would become the United States, a claim the city of Mobile has continued to promote as part of its identity as the birthplace of American Mardi Gras. Despite the site’s significance, its precise present-day location along the river bluffs north of the city has been debated by local historians for years, since the settlement was later abandoned in favor of the current downtown site after repeated flooding.
Rounding out the column was a reference to an old published slight against residents of West Mobile, the kind of good-natured (or not-so-good-natured) rivalry between different pockets of the metro area that longtime residents will recognize. Arguments over which part of town has been slighted, overlooked or misunderstood by the rest of the city are themselves a form of local tradition, one the column appeared to be leaning into rather than resolving.
Columns like this one serve a function beyond entertainment. As downtown Mobile continues to change, with older buildings renovated, repurposed or lost altogether, the effort to pin down details like the fate of the Greyhound station or the true location of Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff becomes part of the broader work of preserving local memory. Local historians and history-minded columnists alike have long argued that these small, sometimes unresolved questions matter because they are the threads that connect the Mobile of today to the Mobile of earlier generations.