DID Ep 7 - Ghost Town at the Top of the Bay

200 years ago, there was another city at the head of Mobile Bay.

For a brief but remarkable time, Blakeley rivaled Mobile in size, commerce, and ambition. Founded by a Connecticut entrepreneur who believed there was room for another great port on the Gulf Coast, Blakeley seemed destined to become one of the most important cities in the young state of Alabama.

But history had other plans.

In this episode of Dauphin Island Diaries, we explore the rise and fall of the ghost town just above Mobile Bay. Along the way, we'll look at the optimism of the early American frontier, the opening of the Old Southwest, steamboats, yellow fever, land speculation, and the fierce economic rivalry between Blakeley and Mobile that ultimately shaped the future of Mobile Bay.

Today, only the old courthouse foundations, a cemetery, and memories remain. Yet if you stand beneath the live oaks overlooking the Tensaw River, it's still almost  possible to imagine the bustling town that once stood there...and to wonder what might have been had history chosen a different path.

Sources

Research for this episode was drawn primarily from:

• An on-site interview with Mike Bunn, Executive Director of Historic Blakeley State Park

Additional information was drawn from:

• Peter J. Hamilton, "Some Southern Yankees" (The American Historical Magazine, October 1898)
• Story of the Tensaw, Blakely, Spanish Fort, Jackson Oaks, Fort Mims by Prescott A. Parker
• Encyclopedia of Alabama
• Voices from 1818
• ExploreSouthernHistory.com
• UnitedStatesGhostTowns.com
• Additional historical and archival resources used for fact-checking, chronology, and background research

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Hosted by Big John Summers

Produced by Summers Media Enterprises

Foley/Sound Effects recorded by Big John Summers

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Dolphin Island Diaries. This is a podcast dedicated to the history of Dolphin Island, Mobile Bay, and the Gulf Coast that surrounds it. Twice each month we bring you a story about the people, the places, and the moments that have shaped this island, and the waters and coastline beyond it. Some of these stories are well known. Others have been buried by time and storms and shifting shorelines. But they're still here. So wherever you are, whether you're on the island, remembering it or discovering it for the first time, find a comfortable place, take a deep breath, relax, and settle in. Because this is one of those stories. The wind moans across the abandoned dirt street of the town, stirring up dust devils that wander across the sand and break against an abandoned old watering trough, now half full of dust and dirt instead of water. Faded lettering on the fronts of buildings suggests what were once thriving businesses, dry goods, hardware, general store. One batwing door hangs from a single hinge in the doorway of what likely was once one of the town saloons. A scorpion scampers across the boardwalk and ducks into a crevice. At the far end of the town's single street, a dilapidated building that used to be white, now a faded tan and gray, stands alone, marking the old town's nod to spirituality. The building's steeple rising above all the rest of the sagging building roof lines. Here and there, hitching posts still stand mostly erect in front of the boardwalk. Several yards away, a leaning wrought iron fence surrounds a collection of rows of crosses and stones marking the town cemetery. And a couple hundred yards away across the desert sands beyond the cemetery, near the base of the nearby mountain, a pile of rubble and rusting equipment mark where the rock was carried from the earth and its ore extracted. Just beyond a few yards up the side of the mountain, a shadow framed by timbers marked the mine's entrance. When the vein of ore died, so did the town. A collection of old buildings in a remote part of New Mexico or the Arizona desert, marking where a mine boom town once thrived and then faded away when that ore that gave it its reason for existing was exhausted. But you come to realize as you look around that there are ghost towns scattered all across the nation, even across the South. Towns whose reason for existence was a crossroads or a rail junction. And when the crossroads was bypassed by the interstate or the railroad itself died, well, the town died with it. Or even like that old West town I described at the beginning. Maybe it was a mining town that died when the coal or copper or bauxite dwindled away. Or when the military base or factory that bolstered it was shuttered. And where dams were built to harness the rivers for hydroelectric power and to control flooding, many river towns are, of course, now ghost towns under the resulting lakes. But I'll tell you where I wasn't really expecting to find a ghost town. Across the bay from Mobile up a river above Spanish Fort, it never occurred to me that there would have been a town there or a reason for one. But there really was. And at one time it was the county seat for Baldwin County. And for a brief time in the early 19th century, it rivaled Mobile in size and importance. If you're familiar with the area, you probably already know that I'm talking about the old town of Blakely. In 1814, there was evidently a different kind of feeling in the country. Of course, there was a war on. The War of 1812 was still underway in 1814. After setbacks that resulted in the burning of Washington, D.C., the U.S. had regrouped. Fort McHenry, outside of Baltimore, Maryland, had withstood the long bombardment of the British Navy, and a local lawyer who had been aboard one of those vessels during the bombardment, spent the long night fearful for the Ford and for the city. But he'd watched from the deck of the ship, marveling at the U.S. flag that continued to fly defiantly, illuminated by the flash of guns and congreve rockets. That lawyer, a man by the name of Francis Scott Key, wrote a poem to pay tribute to that flag. It was later put to the music of a tavern song. And today we know it as our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner. Today we sometimes forget that it marked a moment of national relief and renewed optimism as the young United States proved that it could hold its own militarily against a major world power. And also in 1814, down in the Mobile Bay Area, other things were happening. The previous year, U.S. General James Wilkinson had sailed up the Bay and taken Mobile from the Spanish. Inland, the Muscogee's internal civil war had broadened into the Creek War after the Fort Mims Massacre, part of the War of 1812. And in March 1814, a military force led by Tennessee politician, lawyer, and militia officer named Andrew Jackson had defeated the Red Stick Creeks at their town called Tohopaca, but which is better known to us by the name Horseshoe Bend. In the resulting Treaty of Fort Jackson, the Muscogies, the Creeks, had ceded approximately 23 million acres of land to the United States, which opened up the lower third of modern-day Alabama for settlement. Later in 1814, he would drive right down through Spanish Fort to Pensacola and then would defeat the British in a decisive victory in January 1815. Ironically, after the treaty ending the war had already been signed in Belgium in December 1814. But since the War of Independence, there had been a feeling of growth, of expansion, of moving westward and southward. For a number of years, white settlers had been pushing across the Appalachians and southward into old Georgia, including what had become the Mississippi Territory, what would become the state of Mississippi in 1817 and the state of Alabama in 1819. The creation of the old Federal Road from Milledgeville, Georgia to Fort Stoddart, near modern day Mount Vernon, Alabama, followed roughly the same path as modern-day I-85 to Montgomery and I-65 from there to Mobile. The Federal Road had become a funnel for settlers to move into the area of what was then known as the Southwest, especially after it was widened about 1810 to accommodate army wagons. But once the Treaty of Fort Jackson opened the lands up for settlement and the Spanish were out of the area, the area of modern-day Alabama below the Ellicott Line, the old border between the U.S. and Spanish territories, was now open to settlement. And that's when a Yankee settler from Connecticut by the name of Josiah Blakeley saw his opportunity to create a town on the eastern side of the bay on one of the tributaries of the Tinsaw River. I had to laugh when I saw where Blakely was from, not because it was in and of itself funny, but one of the sources I found as I was researching this was an October 1898 article in the American Historical Magazine by Mobile Attorney, politician, and judge Peter J. Hamilton. And the name of the article is Some Southern Yankees. And knowing where Josiah Blakely came from, the book by Mark Twain went through my mind: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Instead of going back in time to Old England, here was a Connecticut Yankee striving to build a town on a bluff on a branch of the Tinsaw River just above Mobile Bay. But Josiah Blakely wasn't the first to put a town here. There was an Appalachian village here before that. Appalachis who converted to Catholicism had settled here in the early 1700s with the permission and goodwill of the French government when they'd been forced out of Florida. They abandoned the site when France was forced to cede the land to the British after the Seven Years' War. But Blakely was the first American to do it. And he evidently looked at the area, saw what Mobile was and what it was doing, and thought, you know what? I think there's room on the bay for another city. And so he set about building one. When you look back through our nation's history, there are periods of prevailing optimism when the people of that time thought that pretty much anything was possible, when there was a can-do attitude. Those times are when we experience great growth, growth that almost feels like a time that the only direction is up. The end of World War II and into the Eisenhower period, I think, was one of those times in some ways. And I think another such time was this period of time when Josiah Blakely founded the town that bore his name and began to build here. And people saw what he was doing and wanted to be part of it. Blakely had left Harford and moved around a bit, even living for a time in Spanish Cuba. But after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Blakeley moved to Mobile, arriving in 1806, because he was sure that the United States soon would possess the entire region. And this wasn't necessarily unreasonable given that the eastern border of the French colony previously had been the Perdito River. Today the border between Alabama and Florida. He bought 7,000 acres, almost 11 square miles, part of which he intended to turn into a plantation for farming cattle, cotton, and rice. Additionally, he bought a large tract of land near Bio Salon. In 1813, he hired a surveyor to begin plotting out of town, and then he began selling lots. The town of Blakely was officially incorporated in January of 1814. Things were going well for the enterprise. Mobilians and northerners were investing in the town. It was named as the Baldwin County seat, evidently even before being officially incorporated. So things looked very promising for Josiah Blakely. And then he died. Just as the town bearing his name was taking off, Blakeley passed away in 1815. Once Alabama became a state in 1819, the town really did begin to grow. Now, let me put things in perspective here for a moment because our ideas about urban areas and population centers, it's probably driven a great deal by how those are now. But understand that what constituted a large town in the South in the early 1800s isn't what it is today. Probably the largest coastal southern city in 1820 was Charleston, South Carolina, and it had a population of 24 to 25,000 people. Savannah, Georgia had about 7,500 people. Mobile had about 1,500 people in 1820, though that was nearly doubled over the next couple of years. By contrast, the 2020 population of Mobile, just a few years ago, was just over 187,000. Blakely is said during the same period to have peaked at roughly 4,000 in the early 1820s, though I'm told by at least one source that that may be a bit inflated. So when I say it rivaled Mobile in size, I'm not exaggerating. It was during that period at least nearly as large as Mobile, and some sources say that it was even bigger for a brief time. The interesting thing to me is imagining the contrast between the two cities. Over more toward the west side of the bay, Mobile had been founded by Pierre Lemoyne in 1702 as a French colonial town, serving as the original capital of the French colony of Louisiana. It had been a possession of the British for a time, a Spanish possession, and then in 1813 it became part of the United States. So by the early 1820s, Mobile had well over a century of existence and a multinational culture and history. On the other hand, in 1824, Blakely, it was only about a decade old at that point. It was founded by Americans and had never been anything but an American city. Its buildings were all new. It had none of the old world military feel that Fort Charlotte slash Fort Conde possessed, even though Mobile would demolish the old fort in 1823. But Blakeley had been neither a European colony nor a military town. Fort Blakeley wouldn't come until later. What Blakeley had at the time to rival Mobile in importance was a deep, for a time, natural port. There were ships that could get into Blakely, who sometimes couldn't get to Mobile due to the Dog River Bar. This sandbar sometimes impeded access to the port of Mobile. Blakeley's more accessible port enabled it to take advantage of the increase in river and bay traffic that followed Jackson's victory over the Muscogies and the end of the Creek War aspect of the War of 1812, right as Blakeley was being founded and established. So early on, Blakeley was recognized as what is known as a port of entry. By way of explanation for those of you who might not be familiar with the term, port of entry identifies an officially designated location, such as an airport, seaport, land border crossing, where travelers and cargo lawfully enter or exit a country. Of course, there were no airports in the early 1800s. But before General James Wilkinson took mobile for the U.S., when everything below the Ellicott line was a Spanish possession, Fort Stoddart had served as a port of entry for traffic coming across the border into the southern United States. It had been designated as a port of entry by President Thomas Jefferson in 1804. In 1822, Blakeley was officially designated as a U.S. port of entry. That meant that it would have had a United States Customs House there, and a collector of customs would have operated there. Shipping traffic, unable to get into the port at Mobile, was able to do so at Blakeley. That Blakeley was recognized as a port of entry was a pretty big deal for Blakeley, and it soon was to become a big deal for Mobile as well. During this period, the state of Alabama also would have designated a port warden for Blakely. His role would have been enforcing timber and lumber regulations, managing berthing and traffic along the waterfront, inspecting vessels and cargo and maintaining the channel. Given the advantages that Blakely enjoyed over Mobile during the 18 teens and early 1820s, this was a pretty important function and also evidence of the status that Blakeley held at the time. Now, like a lot of those old West ghost towns that we started the episode describing today, Blakeley would have been, in a manner of speaking, a boomtown. Some of those old West towns like Bodie, California, were created when gold was discovered and prospective miners flocked there to get rich quick. Coalwood, West Virginia, which you may know from the movie October Sky, it was a real place and the movie was based on real events. It started in the early 1900s and was built for the miners who worked in the mine there, owned first by the Carter Coal Company and then later by the Olga Coal Company, but other boomtowns grew because of particular industry there. Closer to home, for example, Mobile grew substantially during World War II because of the shipyards building Liberty ships and tankers for the war effort. The big industry in Blakely at its peak was a riverboat manufacturer. Steamboat travel had been invented in the late 1700s, and Robert Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, began traveling on the Hudson River, then called the North River, in 1807. Once the viability of steam-powered vessels had been proven, steamboats proliferated on pretty much every navigable river in America. The company manufacturing steamboats in Blakely was called the Steamboat Company of Alabama, and it was formed about 1820, just as the town began to boom. Two noted shipbuilders of the era, David Brown and Jacob Bell, worked in Blakely for a time. They were originally from New York City, but followed the boom into South Alabama in the late 18 teens. Originally they had set up in St. Stephen's on the Tom Bigby River, but shortly after that they relocated to Blakely. They were said to have been involved in the building of at least two notable steamboats in Blakely, presumably in conjunction with the Steamboat Company of Alabama, given that they claim them in their records, but those vessels are also noted in the history of the area as having been built by the Steamboat Company of Alabama. One of those vessels was called the Mississippi, and it was nearly 400 tons. She was built in 1819 and based on Brown and Bell records, was evidently operated on the Mississippi River because she was snagged off of St. Genevieve, Missouri in 1825. Another smaller boat of about 60 tons was called the Tinsaw, and it was one of the first steamboats ever to steam up the Alabama River as far as Montgomery. Some records speak of people excitedly climbing the bluffs near Soma in August 1822 to watch her arrive. The steamboat industry in Blakely was short-lived, however. By late 1821, Brown and Bell had returned to New York City where they would operate for the next 30 years. The steamboat company of Alabama folded. The sources I found that say anything about this indicate that the company failed financially. Whether that was because their shipbuilding expertise had left and replacing them was financially untenable, or whether Brown and Bell left because of the company's financial struggles, I have no way of knowing at this point. But the main point is that the shipbuilding industry that had helped to fuel the early growth of the town was now gone. The early days of the town are interesting. There are a number of legends pertaining to the town that are fascinating. One of them is that in the early days before a courthouse was built, court was held under one of the nearby live oaks, which is still commonly referred to as the jury oak. And some of that local legend pointed to the specific oak that was used for this. Now, whether that specific oak was always used for that or not, it's difficult to say. Maybe sometimes a different tree was used. Maybe sometimes if there was inclement weather, someone's home or local business would host the proceedings. What is known is that Blakely was the early county seat of Baldwin County. In 1820, the construction of a courthouse was authorized, even though this would not be completed until 1833. But when it was completed, it was a substantial two-story brick structure that would outlive the town and its status as county seat. And legend also speaks of capital punishment being executed in the town. Similar to the jury oak, another nearby live oak was called the hanging tree. Ostensibly, if a defendant would were to be tried of a capital crime and found guilty, the sentence would be carried out at the hanging tree. Again, whether it was the specific tree that was identified as such or another, or maybe both, it's the subject of legend. By the time the courthouse was built, perhaps gallows were constructed. It's entirely possible that there may still be record of such executions. I just didn't have access to them for this episode. And the town was large enough to have several streets and evidently was eventually expanded from the original plant that was surveyed at the request of Josiah Blakely. That speaks to the town's growth. It had a number Of businesses. Dry goods, an attorney, a grocer, hardware, leather goods, and so forth. A newspaper, the Blakely Sun, operated there in the town. It seemed like the town had a number of advantages and was poised to succeed and prosper and continue on for decades to come. So what happened? Why did a boom town disappear when other nearby towns continued to exist and even to grow and prosper? Well, in Blakely's case, there probably were a number of reasons rather than a single one. And the first of those happened when Blakely was at its peak. And as often as the case when that happens, it was probably seen as a setback, but not necessarily as a mortal wound. But when Brown and Bell left and the steamboat company of Alabama failed, and then nothing replaced it, that was a blow. The creation of large riverboats, commercially viable river boats, gave the town gravitas. For the company to fail, and then failed actually rather quickly, that hurt. It probably wasn't fatal by itself, but neither was the town experiencing death by a thousand paper cuts either. Another serious blow, by itself, probably not fatal, but a serious wound, was the role that land speculation played. Quite frankly, land speculators made the cost of buying property in Blakely too expensive for people to want to settle there after a time. Land was available elsewhere. Businesses were able to operate elsewhere more profitably, especially without the overhead of the price of getting started that Blakely was trying to garner. In short, the investors of Blakeley were understandably proud of their town, but perhaps they were too proud. And then an external factor became an issue. Mobile struck back to recapture some of the port traffic they'd been losing. The rubble from the old Fort Conde that had been destroyed. And let me say, when I say that, it hurts to think about the history that was lost with that. But that rubble was used as fill in the process of updating the waterfront and mobile, improving the port facilities. And they evidently began addressing the problem with the Dog River sandbar that it created for shipping getting into the port. So Blakely's port advantage over mobile was not just diminished, it was effectively erased. Shippers who before were using Blakely as a port because mobile wasn't an option now had an option. Another blow had been struck against Blakeley. And then Blakeley's marshy location became a factor. In 1822, 1826, and 1828, yellow fever epidemics decimated the town's population. Deaths were so high that the survivors were forced to bury the dead in mass graves. This is not to say that Mobile didn't also experience such epidemics. It did. And in fact, an 1819 epidemic that took the lives of nearly half of Mobile's population might help to explain why, at its height, that Blakely was said to have had a larger population than Mobile. So the problems that caused the decline and death ultimately of Blakely weren't a single issue. It was multiple factors, some external, some self-inflicted. But much like a patient weakened by a wound ends up dying of pneumonia, Blakeley was weakened by a number of wounds and began to fade. By the early 1830s, even as the new courthouse was being built, important things that showed Blakely's status were being removed. The U.S. Customs House was being removed in the early 1830s. The office of the port warden was removed as well. These were basically the pneumonia that killed the weakened patient. Once they were gone, any port business that might have remained in Blakely also went with them. The city was no longer a place of national and even international importance. Now it was merely a county seat. And over time, even that was pretty much inname only. When I talked with historian and director of the Blakely Historic State Park, Mike Bunn, he told me that over the course of the next several years, basically people would come into the courthouse to conduct official business there. But the town that had once been the reason for locating it there had pretty much ceased to exist. During the Civil War, the Confederacy constructed substantial earthen fortifications in the area and named that Fort Blakely. But the fort wasn't constructed to protect the town. The town no longer existed in any meaningful way. The fort was constructed to guard the approach to Selma in the interior of Alabama, where much of the Confederate munitions were being produced. On April 9, 1865, the same day that Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, the Union Army launched their final assault on the Confederate positions at Fort Blakeley in one of the last major battles of the war. By the end of the day, the Federals had taken the fort. Three days later, on the fourth anniversary of the start of the war, Mobile also fell. And three years later, in 1868, Blakeley itself ceased to exist in any official capacity. The Baldwin County seat was moved to nearby Daphne. All that was left then of Blakely were the buildings that remained and a few foundations, the cemetery and memories. Today you can visit the site of Blakely. The state park that bears its name is striven not only to remember that the site exists, but to help visitors understand what was here. The foundation of the old courthouse has been excavated and a large structure constructed over it to enable visitors to view what remains, but it prevents those visitors from physically accessing what's left to help protect it from vandals and thieves, striving to ensure that what remains is there for future generations to see and understand what was here. Interpretive panels briefly explain the history of the structure and the excavation of the foundation. The tree that was believed possibly to be the jury tree is no more. Its remains, now just logs, lie next to the dirt road that marks the main path through the old town site to the river. The tree believed possibly to be the hanging tree is still there and it's marked as such, though the limbs that probably served as the gallows beam in 19th century executions have had to be removed. Throughout the area of the old town site, skeletal structures are scattered strategically that represent where businesses might have stood. Mike Bunn shared with me that he has not been able to find a plat of the main part of the town during its heyday, but he does have a plat for one of the expansions. On the building skeleton fronts, signs are hung identifying businesses. These are actual businesses that operated in Blakely during this time, but unfortunately, no one knows for sure where those businesses truly were located. As I walked this ground where Blakeley once stood, once a bustling town full of energy and optimism. Now a quiet sight with wind whispering through the live oaks overhead. I'm reminded of the impermanence of what man builds. History has a way of making the winners seem inevitable. But Blakeley reminds us that they aren't. For a few brief years, a lot of people genuinely believed that the future of Mobile Bay lay at least in part on this bluff above the branch of the Tinsaw River that is now called by the town's name. If you stand in just the right spot, you might even be able to see the high rises across the Bay of Mobile. But as for here, were it not for the efforts of archaeologists and historical preservationists, you might walk this ground and never realize what was here 200 years ago, and never wonder what might have been. But history simply chose another path. And that's going to do it for this episode of Dolphin Island Diaries. In our next episode in a couple of weeks, we'll be headed back to the island and we'll be looking at what has become an institution there, the Little Red Schoolhouse, which is, of course, now the Dolphin Island Welcome Center and Museum. Next week, in our Interviews Day episode, I'll be sharing the interview I did a few weeks ago with the director of historic Blakeley State Park, Mike Bunn, as we walked around the site of Old Blakely and talked together. This interview informed today's episode to a significant degree, but there's a lot more in that interview that I could possibly share today. I hope you'll be watching for both of those to drop when we again explore where memories intermingle with the sand, the waves, and the wind. Until then, I'm Big John Summers, and these are Dolphin Island Diaries. May you enjoy fair winds today and a beautiful Dolphin Island sunset. Before we close things out, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the sources behind this episode. As I just noted, the single most valuable resource for this story was an on-site interview with historian Mike Bunn, director of Historic Blakely State Park. Mike not only shared the documented history of Blakely, but also helped distinguish between established fact, local tradition, and the questions that historians are still trying to answer. His perspective greatly shaped this episode. I also relied on a number of published historical works, including Peter J. Hamilton's article, Some Southern Yankees, from the October 1898 edition of the American Historical Magazine, which provides a fascinating contemporary look at New England settlers who helped shape early Mobile and Blakely. The Encyclopedia of Alabama article on Blakely provided helpful historical summaries and chronology, while Prescott Parker's Story of the Tinsaw, Blakeley, Spanish Fort at Jackson Oaks, Fort Mims preserved many of the local traditions and early historical accounts surrounding the town and the surrounding region. For Blakely's maritime story, I also consulted Voices from 1818, which provided valuable information on the steamboat company of Alabama and the early steamboat industry that briefly flourished at Blakeley. Additional background came from exploresuthernhistory.com and United States Ghost Towns.com, both of which help provide context for Blakely's development, decline, and preservation. Finally, I'd like to thank the staff and volunteers of Historic Blakely State Park for preserving this remarkable place. Today, visitors can still walk the ground where those old streets were, explore the courthouse foundation, see the cemetery, and experience one of the most important historic landscapes along Mobile Bay, which includes the site of the Battle of Fort Blakeley. Without those preservation efforts, much of Blakely's story might have been lost forever. As always, if you'd like to explore these stories for yourself, I encourage you to visit the places we've talked about today if you can. History comes alive in a very different way when you're standing where it happened. And thanks so much for listening.