A new local history book, Mobile Bay: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, has arrived at Bienville Books and other outlets, offering readers a wide-ranging look at the estuary that shapes life across the Mobile Bay region. The book is co-authored by Michael Thomason, professor emeritus of history at the University of South Alabama, archivist Carol Ellis, and corporate-profile writer Elisabeth Doehring, with photography by longtime Mobile broadcaster Catt Sirten.
The arrival of a substantial new volume on the bay adds to a small but important shelf of works that document the region’s past for general readers. Local history books occupy a particular place in Mobile’s cultural life: they preserve the record of a city and its surrounding waters whose story stretches from Spanish and French colonial expeditions through the antebellum cotton trade, the Civil War, the shipbuilding boom of the twentieth century and the industrial port city of today. Bienville Books, the independent bookstore in downtown Mobile where the title is now available, has long served as a hub for exactly this kind of regional publishing.
Building on Earlier Work
The new title follows two previous books Thomason published on the history of Mobile, in 1981 and 2001. Where those earlier works focused primarily on the city itself, the new book widens the lens to cover the entire Mobile Bay region, tracing its development from its early history up through the present day.
That widening reflects how the region itself has changed across the decades between volumes. In 1981, the economies on either side of the bay were more separate: Mobile’s port and industry on the western shore, the fishing villages and resort communities of the eastern shore, and Baldwin County’s agricultural interior beyond. In the years since, the giant container terminal at the port, the aerospace plant in Mobile, the growth of Spanish Fort, Daphne and Fairhope, and the ever-thickening traffic across the bay bridges have knitted the two shores into a single metropolitan region. A history that stops at the city limits no longer tells the whole story, and Thomason’s broader frame matches the way residents actually experience the place.
Thomason has spent decades documenting the visual and social history of the area through USA’s archives and his own scholarship, and Ellis brings additional archival research to the project. As the longtime archivist for the University of South Alabama, Ellis has been a central figure in preserving the documentary record of the Gulf Coast, and her knowledge of photograph collections, manuscripts and oral histories informs the book’s research base.
A Broadcaster’s Eye for Images
Sirten, known to longtime Mobile radio listeners, contributes photography that runs throughout the book. For decades, Sirten was a familiar voice on Mobile airwaves and a well-traveled observer of the local scene, and his photographs bring a practitioner’s understanding of the region to the page. The combination is fitting for a book about a bay: the water itself, the vessels that work it, the shoreline neighborhoods and the natural landscapes that border it all lend themselves to photography in a way that few civic subjects do.
Visual documentation has always been central to how Mobile’s history reaches the public. Historic photograph collections in the city document the waterfront when it was lined with cotton presses and steamship berths, the Mardi Gras celebrations that have made the port city the home of America’s original carnival, and the neighborhoods that grew up around the shipyards during World War II. A new book that pairs scholarly research with contemporary and archival images continues that tradition and puts it on coffee tables as well as library shelves.
The Bay as the Region’s Center
Framing the history around the bay itself — rather than the city or either county — mirrors the region’s deep geography. Mobile Bay is an estuary where the fresh water of the Mobile, Tensaw, Spanish and Blakeley rivers meets the Gulf of Mexico, and that mixing of waters has shaped everything around it: the oyster and shrimp fisheries that fed generations of families, the port that made Mobile one of the nation’s great cotton shipping cities, and the modern industrial corridor that now includes one of the busiest container terminals on the Gulf.
The bay has also been the scene of defining moments in American history. During the Civil War, the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864 brought Adm. David Farragut’s fleet past the forts at the entrance and gave the Union Navy one of its signature victories. In the twentieth century, the bay’s shores hosted shipyards that launched vessels for two world wars, and the causeways and bridges that cross the water became the region’s connecting threads. A book that treats “yesterday, today and tomorrow” as a single narrative invites readers to see those layers together rather than as disconnected episodes.
The “tomorrow” in the title is a recognition that the estuary’s story is still being written. Environmental pressures, including storm surge, changing salinity and the long work of restoring habitats damaged by industrialization, remain part of the bay’s ongoing account, as do the economic developments that keep remaking the shoreline. A history that closes with the future rather than the past makes the point that residents are participants in that story, not merely readers of it.
University Scholarship and Public History
The book also represents the role the University of South Alabama has played in the region’s cultural life since its founding. USA’s archives have grown into a major repository for Gulf Coast materials, collecting photographs, manuscripts, oral histories and organizational records that document Mobile and the surrounding counties. Scholars such as Thomason built their careers in that environment, and the university’s history department has long encouraged faculty to write for the general public as well as for academic journals.
That relationship between the university and the wider community is a two-way street. Local families, businesses and institutions donate their papers and photographs to the archives; researchers draw on them to produce books like this one; and the finished works circulate back into the community through bookstores, libraries and school classrooms. The pattern has kept the region’s history unusually well documented for a metropolitan area of its size, and it explains why Mobile readers can find serious, locally grounded books on subjects ranging from colonial settlement to Mardi Gras to civil rights.
Carol Ellis’s archival expertise is particularly significant in that ecosystem. The collections she has stewarded include some of the most important visual records of twentieth-century Mobile, and books that draw on them help justify the continuing investment in preserving such materials. Every volume that puts archival photographs and research into public circulation strengthens the case that local history is worth collecting, funding and teaching.
Why Local History Books Endure
Even in an era when general interest has shifted online, local history books continue to sell in Gulf Coast communities, and the arrival of a new title at an independent bookstore is itself a small civic event. Part of the appeal is practical: newcomers to the region, who arrive in growing numbers with the port’s expansion and the area’s industrial growth, want a grounded introduction to the place they now call home. Part of it is gift-giving; a well-photographed regional history is a standard present for graduates, retirees and visiting relatives.
There is also a deeper reason. Mobile Bay residents live surrounded by the evidence of the region’s layered past — forts and historic districts, seafood restaurants that occupy former docks, bridges that replaced ferries, cemeteries and churches older than the state itself. A book that explains how those layers accumulated gives residents a way of reading their own surroundings. It converts a daily commute across the bay into a passage through history.
Where to Find It
Mobile Bay: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is available now at Bienville Books in downtown Mobile, as well as through online booksellers, for residents interested in the region’s history. The store’s Dauphin Street location places it in the heart of the historic district, a fitting retail setting for a book whose subject is the city and its waters, and staff there have long championed regional authors and titles.
For teachers in Mobile and Baldwin counties, the book offers a ready-made resource for Alabama history units, which are a standard part of the state’s social studies curriculum. For boat owners, anglers, birders and beachgoers, it supplies the backstory to a body of water most residents use constantly but few have studied systematically. And for anyone who has watched the region grow over recent decades, the volume offers something rarer: a single narrative that connects the deep past of Spanish and French sail to the container cranes now rising over the port, and that looks past both toward what the bay will become.