Most drivers passing through Lillian on U.S. 98 see a quiet crossroads community on Perdido Bay and little else. Curry Weber sees a landscape dense with clues: a War of 1812 fort that stood for only months before Spanish soldiers burned it, a colonial-era trading post on what was once the border between French Louisiana and Spanish Florida, a Roaring ’20s hotel whose big-band dances drew crowds to the shore, and a hilltop Spanish cemetery whose faded stones predate the town itself.
Weber — an audio engineer and professional archaeologist who has lived in the community for nearly a decade — is on a one-person mission to recover Lillian’s buried history, and he is using both of his careers to do it.
A Fort on the Bluff
The history that fascinates Weber most hides in plain sight on a surprisingly high bluff in Lillian’s southeastern quadrant, sloping toward the state line. In April 1813, when American infantry forces took Mobile from Spain, one of their first moves was establishing a stockade fort on that ground. “It was there only for a few months before the Spanish came across it and burned it,” Weber says, “because the American troops had recently been called back to Mobile.”
He is equally intrigued by something older and more elusive: a trading post that operated in the area a century earlier, in the early 1700s, when the French held Mobile and the Spanish held Pensacola — with the Perdido River running between the two colonial territories as the effective border. Documentary evidence is thin. “I’ve only seen a few brief mentions of it,” he says.
From Sun Studio to the Lab Bench
Weber’s path to Perdido Bay ran through two of Memphis’s most famous addresses. A Louisiana native, he earned a degree in recording arts from Full Sail University in Florida, then spent 17 years in Memphis working at Sun Studio — the birthplace of rock and roll — and Ardent Studios, two of the most storied recording facilities in American music. His family, meanwhile, had deep local ties: his father’s side was from Mobile, and since the 1960s the family kept a place on Little Lagoon, where the family spent summers.
In 2016 he and his wife Laura moved to Orange Beach, then settled in Lillian to raise their four children — Noah, Annie, Olivia and Katie. History and music, he says, have always been his two passions, and the history gene runs in the family: his paternal grandparents were avid readers and devoted history buffs.
The Ancient Canal That Started It All
Weber’s archaeological second act began with a remarkable volunteer project on the Fort Morgan peninsula: a team effort to unearth and document an ancient canal dug by Native Americans centuries ago — a feature locals had long talked about but which had never been formally studied. While researching the canal, Weber pulled maps and papers from the national archives and stumbled onto a reference to Pancho’s Ferry, a ferry crossing operated by Francisco Suarez, one of the area’s earliest settlers. “Looking at the location on the map,” he says, “I realized it was about a mile from my house.”
The canal work led him to the Foley public library, where he met Jon Glass of All Phases Archaeology, a cultural resources management firm in Mobile. The firm was shorthanded on a big project and asked him to help in the lab. “I started washing artifacts,” Weber says, “which is something I was doing with the girls at home anyway, except now I was getting paid for it.” Five years on, he works cultural-resources projects across the region — recently in Wiggins and Vicksburg, Mississippi — while still running sound for bands part-time.
A Windshield Tour Through Two Centuries
Ask Weber for a tour and Lillian unfolds layer by layer. There is the probable site of the town’s first post office, established in 1884 and named by a postmaster for his daughter. There is the former site of the Perdido Bay Hotel on Barclay Avenue — named for the developer who sold the first lots — whose grounds once ran down to the water with sidewalks and lights, the Roaring ’20s scene of fine dining, big bands and dances. Across the highway, in and around today’s Spanish Cove neighborhood, stand the ancestral homes of the Suarez and Resmondo families and an old Spanish cemetery with gravestones fading into the 1800s. Nearby grow many of the more than a thousand pecan trees planted in 1909 by oilman Harry Haines Willock, who died in 1940.
At low tide, Weber combs the shoreline — sometimes with his daughter Katie — reading ceramics and glass fragments the way he once read recording tape. And on the bluff where he believes the fort stood, a neighbor’s artifact collection, handed over to Weber, includes artillery and infantry uniform buttons from the War of 1812. “That is as close as we can get to the past without having an actual time machine,” he says.
Historic Lillian, Online and Off
Because so much of Lillian’s record lives in attics rather than archives, Weber created a Facebook group, Historic Lillian, AL, where residents can post old photographs, stories and family heirlooms — a digital repository for a town that has almost none. He writes extensively in the group himself, and it has connected him with historians and descendants of the earliest settlers, some of whom reach out with family photos and artifacts.
“A lot of times, with old pictures and photo albums, the younger generations sometimes just don’t care, and then they just disappear, gone forever,” he says — unless someone gathers them in time. “There are so many stories here waiting to be told, and that is what keeps me going. Reading and studying about the colorful people and these fascinating but little-known events that happened in your own backyard and, if you’re lucky, holding some of that history in your hand — that is as close as we can get to the past without having an actual time machine.”