A Fairhope Lawyer’s Campaign to Give Dixey Bar Its Proper Name
In March 2005, Fairhope attorney David Bagwell asked federal geographers to make Dixey Bar official, tracing its name to a clipper ship lost in a hurricane at the mouth of…
Three Golden Ages and a Silver One: Reading Mobile’s History in Its Buildings
In a March 2005 series on Mobile's golden age, attorney Palmer Hamilton argued the city had three of them, and that the proof stands in its churches, schools and antebellum…
‘We Are in the Golden Age Now’: A Councilman on Race Relations in Mobile
Asked in March 2005 to name Mobile's golden age, City Councilman Fred Richardson answered with the present tense, and pointed to a small change in newspaper style as a milestone.
Cotton, Shipyards and Brookley: One Mobilian’s Blunt Accounting of the City’s Fortunes
Mark Berson placed Mobile's golden age between 1830 and 1860, traced its long decline through the loss of Brookley Field, and argued in 2005 that the city was poised to…
Mon Louis Island and a Servant’s Reward: The French Roots of a Mobile Family
The second installment of a Mobile family memoir traces a French line back to Bienville's settlers, to land between Bayou La Batre and Coden, and to how Mon Louis Island…
The Boy Who Rowed Out to Farragut’s Fleet: A Mobile Family’s Memoir Begins
A memoir by Sister Marie Emilie, a Mobile-born nun, opens with an Irish immigrant on the docks, a wounded Confederate prisoner, and a boy summoned home by Admiral Farragut himself.
The Gonzo Journalist Who Wrote a Book in a Mobile Apartment
After Hunter S. Thompson's death in February 2005, Mobile friends recalled the months the gonzo journalist spent writing a book in a borrowed apartment on Government Street.
Phone Booths at the Battle House: A Mobile Broker’s Secret Courtship of a Cotton King
In a serialized memoir of a bygone Mobile, a group of stockbrokers plotting to leave a tyrannical boss found a backer in a courtly New Orleans financier who once cornered…
Cold Feet on the Coast: A Mobile Broker’s Conscience Nearly Sinks the Plot
The fourteenth installment of a bygone-Mobile memoir finds the conspirators summoned to a financier's beach house, an office secured in the Waterman Building, and one man losing his nerve.
The Contract, the Confrontation and the Green-Faced Boss: A Mobile Walkout Remembered
The fifteenth installment of a bygone-Mobile memoir delivers the payoff: a suspiciously generous contract, a coordinated resignation, and a boss confronted at his club.