Dauphin Island Diaries
A long-form history podcast focused on the people, places, and stories that shaped Dauphin Island and the Alabama Gulf Coast.
Dauphin Island Diaries
DID Bonus INTERVIEWSDAY Material (4) - Interview with Mike Bunn
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It's INTERVIEWSDAY!
In this Interviewsday edition (Interview Tuesday) of Dauphin Island Diaries, I sit down with historian Mike Bunn to take a deeper look at the fascinating story behind last week's episode, "Ghost Town at the Top of the Bay."
Mike serves as Director of Historic Blakeley State Park and is one of the foremost authorities on the history of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the Alabama Gulf Coast. His research and expertise were invaluable in developing the story of Blakeley, a town that once rivaled Mobile for prominence before fading into history.
In this conversation, Mike discusses:
• The founding of Blakeley and why its location made it so important
• How Blakeley competed with Mobile during the early 19th century
• Life in one of Alabama's earliest boomtowns
• The economic, political, and geographic forces that shaped the town's rise and decline
• How Historic Blakeley State Park preserves and interprets this remarkable chapter of Gulf Coast history
While last week's episode told the story of Blakeley's rise and fall, this interview allows us to go much deeper into the history with one of the people who knows it best. If you enjoyed "Ghost Town at the Top of the Bay," you'll find even more context, insight, and fascinating details in this extended conversation.
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I am at the Blakely Town site, it's a ghost town, with Mike Bunn. And Mike is the director of the Blakely State Park. He's also the author of a number of books, including, I think, Mike Alabama textbooks, even.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I don't know when you sleep because I know how many books you got out there. And doing this, I don't I don't know how you can how you can keep it all going and not stay up 24-7. So, but we are at the town of Blakely, which is no longer a town, and it was established in 1814. I'll let you talk about a little bit about that history, if you don't mind.
SPEAKER_03Sure, sure. It was the uh a dream of Mr. Josiah Blakely. He had been uh he's from the Northeast, he uh had been in Mobile immediately prior to this, he'd also lived in Cuba and lived in other places, and he was sort of an enterprising individual. He noticed that as the Gulf, uh really the Mobile Tensor Delta and the Gulf Coast here came under American control, he was very convinced that there was room for more than one uh trading city here at the outlet of all these rivers that drain into Mobile Bay. And Mobile was going and he said, you know, there's a nice uh uh dry, high, long bluff over there on the tensor. He said, uh, wouldn't it be great if we could found another town? There's plenty of room for more than one, so that was his vision to create a trading town that would rival Mobile. He never did live to see it develop into its heyday, but he he laid the groundwork for that, and he's the one that pushed through and got the Mississippi Territory legislature to pass that legislation.
SPEAKER_00Okay, and you know, it being established in 1813, that would have been actually right as the you know, as as Wilkinson came in and and took the right after it, yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Okay, so and and of course we're you know, it would it would have been not too far from here where Kemper came across with his people. I know they were somewhere in the Spanish Fort area camping out in corral.
SPEAKER_03A little bit, a little bit north of here, and then they went over and went over to uh basically where it's Sara Land is where they got caught um by the Spaniards. But yeah, um this was an area that was that was known uh by by people. It it's it's sometimes described, people envision it as just this brand new place, and they looked across the bay, but this is a place people have been traveling and knowing for a long time. You know, where we're standing, it shows up on 1770s maps as as a as a place where there were colonial era plantations. The Struthers and the Baidon plantation were uh very near each other, basically on other sides of Bayou Salon, which enters into the Tinsall. And uh those 1770s maps, those particularly the one by drawn by David Tate, shows this area as what they call the Appalachian's old field. So there was an Appalachian Indian village here, which is why we've got a reconstruction of Appalachian House. So this is an area that people knew about this bluff, they knew about the sources of fresh water, but Blakely was the first one to really try to develop an American town.
SPEAKER_00Okay, very that's that's that's that's interesting. And in its heyday, it actually did rival Mobile for importance and size, and and and that would have been win.
SPEAKER_03Uh so Blakely was failed in 1814, you begin to sell lots a year or two after that, and it really sort of uh reaches its its height of being uh a a going urban entity in the early 1820s. So that's when it's really showing the most promise. You finally got people moving here, they're buying the lots, they're building homes. You've got a newspaper that's established here that was being printed. Uh some of the first steamboats in the state of Alabama were being built here. Uh you've got uh a variety of other commercial enterprises. At one point you had nearly two dozen commercial establishments, dry goods stores and hardware stores, et cetera. So that's all in the early 1820s when it looks like this place is about to really blow up and it was already sort of rivaling Mobile in some ways. Now the population was was uh going pretty well, but it was not quite where Mobile was. The commercial traffic is what Mobile is concerned about. But it it it never got to the point that it made a huge dent in Mobile's commercial traffic, but they could see that if they did not do something, it was. So uh th they they really got aggressive Mobile did about improving their harbor, then doing doing uh all kinds of things to improve access to the harbor. But Blakely was actually a port of entry at one point, had its own port ward and so all these things are happening in the early mid 1820s, and of course the story is we'll talk about in the future, I'm sure, but that the the the few the the story is that it it could not maintain that that pace and eventually became a ghost town. But for a while in the eighteen twenties, it was a serious rival, it shows up even on the first state seal of Alabama as one of the major population centers in the entire state.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that's interesting. And and of course, at that point, because Alabama's becoming a state in 1819, so what you're talking about is it's on the on it's it's heading upward at the point when when Alabama's becoming a state. And so going back even before that, and I'm and I may be misspeaking here, and this is the reason why I get experts to ask questions to ask questions of them, but I know one of the things that was going on, you know, before the whole West Florida thing, before Wilkinson his expedition and and and all of that, when we're talking about the late 1700s, early 1800s, one of the things that's going on is the people that are moving into what was then the old Southwest Territory, they come down the Federal Road, they're headed over into the Fort Stoddard area. And when they want to come, when they want to send trade, you know, their their the things they're producing, uh, they want to ship them, they've got to go through mobile. The Spanish are charging some pretty high taxes on those things, and they're doing that on everything that comes through, and it's not necessarily based on what the actual value is, it's based on what they value at it at is you know they're what they assess it at. So in some cases, they're overtaxing things. So people are trying to figure out ways to run the you know, run around.
SPEAKER_03Was this one of those areas where there was this was one of the areas that they they attempted to run around? Of course they couldn't. They're the the uh the Spanish were watching, but they were trying to find ways to get things into Mobile Bay, to get it to international ports, rather than pay those onerous duties that the Spanish were charging. Now at times Spain would relent, and there'd be windows of time when there was no charge. That was what the Americans understood the agreement was supposed to be, that there was free navigation from both sides, but they would periodically just enforce that. They the even even the supplies that came in by boat to go to help supply the troops up at Fort Starter, which at this point was just inside the American border. Right, just above Alberta. And at times they were even holding that and char and and forcing the United States government to pay something, which obviously didn't sit well. So this was an area of intrigue for quite a while before it became part of the United States, and that's just one of the many stories that help you understand this is sort of a contested borderland for a while, which is which is an interesting backdrop for a city to take shape in.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, and and then the next question along those same lines, one of the things I've been finding in my research is that, oh, by the way, there was a considerable portion of of the Gulf area that was supposed to have been included as part of the Louisiana Purchase, according to the United States. Spain said no. And would this have been part of that or would it would have still been really well into Spanish territory?
SPEAKER_03Well, it it would have it would have involved this area, and that's sort of a a claim that sort of that got made a little bit after it. So it's not that necessarily at the time the Americans really pushed to have this included, but upon reflection, they look back at the documents and said the because because the the uh purchase referenced that it would that it would include all of what the French had regarded as the colony of Louisiana. And so they looked back and realized that, you know, they're trying to get Mobile anyway. They said, you know what? The French recognized the border between their colony of Louisiana and Florida as the Perdito River. Right. Which is the modern boundary between Alabama and Florida, Pensacola and Mobile. They s so they they picked up on that and said, you know, really we should already have this. Right. And that became a uh a point that presidential administrations made that other people uh insisted on, and i it was one of the several arguments that ended up taking place of why this should be American territory. And ultimately the United States just took it. But before that, they were pressuring Spain. They even came down and offered, they threatened a military uh activity, and then they talked with the the the governor here, uh the commandant and said, you know, uh you're you're outnumbered. If we wanted to take it, we could. We'll make this great deal with you where we will you will hand over the territory, we'll even pay for everything need needed for your guys to move out of here, we'll let you take your supplies. So they they they just were pushing constantly and they thought that at one at any given point word was going to arrive from Spanish officials said this is no longer worth it, but it just never really did. Right. They kept trying to hold on to it, but the United States, for many years prior to the War of 1812, really thought they were on the verge of taking it.
SPEAKER_00Well, from the standpoint, and and by the way, for our listeners, this was being from a Spanish standpoint administered from Havana. And so for them, it was a cash cow. Why would you give a cash cow away?
SPEAKER_03Well, it was not only that it had some some monetary value in terms of what it could generate, it it controlled access to those riverways. So it's a very strategic location, even beyond any monetary uh generation, and it also served as a buffer to protect other holdings in the region. If you let the United States have the entire Gulf Coast, you've got no protection, no infrastructure that's going to slow down that westward expansion to their more value property, more valuable properties in Mexico and the western United States, where mining and other things are going on. So Spain viewed it as a strategic buffer and a potential source of income, and you put all that together and they were very loath to surrender it to you.
SPEAKER_00And for our listeners who may be interested in, of course, this is being done for Dolphin Island Diaries, but our sister podcast, the Tennessee History Nerd, the episode that dropped yesterday, which is uh the first episode in June of 2026, excuse me, the second episode of June of 2026. It is about the state of Franklin, and the state of Franklin actually had begun, or John Severe as as governor of State of Franklin had begun doing some negotiations with Spain, and it was about that same thing that Mike just mentioned. They were looking, Spain from their perspective, was looking at Franklin as potentially being a buffer against some of that westward expansion to slow some of the slow down some of the uh settlers coming across the Appalachians and moving into this area, of course, probably would have actually accelerated it, but that's not what they were thinking at that point. So, talking then about Blakely itself, I mean, you know, we we we talked about some of the background, and when I look back over here to the side of where we are, there are some logs lying over here in this area. What are those logs?
SPEAKER_03Well, that what you're looking at right there is the remains of a of a tree, a historic tree, that we call the jury open. So that is allegedly one of the places that the Baldwin County courts functioned prior to there actually being a courthouse. Now, Blakeley was the county seat. There were a lot of live oaks and shady spots to hold court. Is that necessarily exactly where Judge Harry Tillman had court? I can't really say that, but what I can say is that since the park's opening in 1981 and the original administrator, Mary Grice, that has been one of the stories that she told on tours, and it's become such so ingrained in legend that that we carry on that tradition, but we we put it as sort of legends and lore about Blackley because I can't document it, but I can document that there's enough grains of truth there that that if it was at that specific tree, it was certainly somewhere in the area, and so we like to use that one as sort of a local landmark that helps you connect with a story.
SPEAKER_00Okay, and and that's that's interesting, and then of course where we're standing right now, where we've parked, is across from where the courthouse itself was. There's the foundation there that's been excavated. You now have a structure over it to protect it. You got bars around it to keep people from going in and damaging it or or or or taking souvenirs. When would that have been built?
SPEAKER_03That was built in the late 1820s, about 1830. It was this this functioned as the county seat for a few years before that. So we we don't have a really good documentation of what was going on in those periodic court sessions. There's an assumption that they just kind of met wherever they needed to, but there were a lot of buildings in Blakely at the time. So we don't know. Maybe court was uh some ad hoc sessions were held in in a hardware store. We just don't know all the details of that. But they they knew they needed a an official permanent county seat. They eventually got this thing built and it was a two-story structure with a courthouse and a jail. And what we've done back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there there was some some grant money that came available to fully excavate that foundation. Herringbone patterned brick, and you can see the incomplete outline, and then a structure was erected over it to protect it, and so that's what you're looking at. But it is it is the first courthouse that was built here, but there were sessions of court held here prior to that.
SPEAKER_00Okay, and so just just to be clear because I've had comments placed out on my Facebook page that that was built after the town died, the the courthouse. No, the the structure over it was built much later, but the courthouse itself was here when there was a town here. I mean it wouldn't have made sense to put a courthouse in there. But but and and when I saw that it was like, you know, I'm not gonna say anything until I talk to Mike, but but I'm talking to Mike real soon, so we'll we'll we'll go through that. And and then you know, to that point, you've got the courthouse over here. Well, if you've got uh a case being tried in that court and there's a capital crime and there is a a conviction, what happens then?
SPEAKER_03Well, in cases where where the punishment for a murder was hanging, it would have taken place somewhere nearby. And so of course I know where you're going. We've got another oak that is rumored to have been the hanging oak, the hanging trees, where those murder convictions would have been carried out by hanging. Again, it's the same thing. It's what's recognized on on the on that legends and the Lord panel is that I cannot, with 100% accuracy, go to it and tell you, I know for sure a hanging took place, but this is part of the story that the original founder helped make come alive for people and found a very prominent tree that fit the bill and and it's become a landmark. And although I can't, you know, as I said, I I'm a story and I want to take you to the spot and verify it. And no, I can't do that with this. But what I can verify is that things like that took place and this has become a great touchstone that connects people with that story. So there's again, there's a grain of truth, it's a plausible scenario. We explain it as that, but it helps you visualize something. Okay. And so that's its importance to me.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Well, and and I appreciate one of the things I've I don't know how much you've seen what I'm doing, but I do really, I don't consider myself an historian, but I do, I'm accuracy matters. And and if I'm inaccurate, I want to know about it. And and and and you know, if if it's not something I can say, I know this to be the truth, it's rumored. I'll say it's legend, I'll say it's, you know, but but I can't confirm it 100%.
SPEAKER_03Legend is a part of understanding local history. So I'm I'm fine with us having some legends that and some focal surrounding Blakely, as long as it's based in some truth, or we can tell you what we know, and we can take you to something, help you visualize something, sort of like we've we built these ghost structures. You know, they did not literally stand on these spots, but it helps you understand. They were informed by a lot of of cumulative knowledge about what things looked like, and we want to use those as just to help you reference it so it comes alive in your mind's eye. Okay. And these legends help you do that.
SPEAKER_00Let's walk through some of that a little bit. And and and until you just now said what you said, I thought that these were on the footprint of where these places were located. So that's not the case.
SPEAKER_03Not necessarily. We we don't have the on this bluff, there's been several eras of human occupation, there's been a lot of disturbance, and if you look at any given section of land, you're going to find things like Native American pottery will be sitting in soil two inches above a Civil War bullet. So things have been churned up, and so it's difficult to get a really clean footprint of a building the way we would like to. But what we did have is a lot of information from the newspapers and other sources about some of the businesses that were here. And we wanted to develop something to help school groups especially, but visitors of all ages understand the physical reality of an urban entity in the early 1800s because it's a ghost tale, nothing's left. So we built things to the size and the scale based on what we know from here and other nearby well-documented structures to help you understand the physical reality of what it would have been like to walk into a a block of commercial buildings. So we place them in in a location that really facilitated easy touring by groups, which is right near the road. We've got a big loop trail that we can take. So we don't claim that they are in the footprint, but we claim that they are very close to the the size, the scale, the mass, the height, the width of known structures of the time period.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And these names that you have on the fronts of these ghost structures here.
SPEAKER_03Those are actual um uh store names. Yeah. Yeah, those are those are business entities. Sturdivant, Trouton, Gurney, Peters and Stebbins, James L. Seabury, all these are known businesses that operated in Blakely, late 1810s, early 1820s, documented and placed ads in the newspaper and all that. So we pulled out a few that were representative of things that were going on here and uh wanted to kind of establish a commercial block. And that's what we've done with these three, these three adjoined buildings.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Now you'd mentioned that Blakely was a not only a port, but they were manufacturing steamboats.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Where I mean, obviously that's going to be down closer to the river, but where would that have been?
SPEAKER_03Would it have been this way, would it have been that way, or down closer to our dock where our boat leaves from at the Blakely Dock, just to the left of that, we've got a big open space. All the information we have is that is literally the location where some of that construction took place. I would like to know more about how they actually launched these things because boats typically have some sort of ways that you're going to launch it into. So uh it'd be neat to to know, you know, how were they built? Or were they built literally on the water and you know they let it slide down away? Was it a ramp that was uh that was a little bit further inland? I don't know the specifics, but I do know that's where they built it. And uh so that that's a really interesting connection when you think about the incredible importance steamboats played in in Alabama's economy. Suddenly you go to anywhere you're near a river, anywhere in the state, if you can get your crop to a river port, you can get it to international markets. And think that blakely played one small role in the beginning of that mechanical revolution, which just totally changed everything in Alabama, incredibly energized the economy, also sadly facilitated the exponential rise in slavery and cotton plantations.
SPEAKER_00But good, bad, and different, that's a very important statewide and regional story that tells and and then how yeah, you know, when I think about Mobile, Mobile has the waterfront. I mean, it's it's you walk down the hill, it's there. And and you're right on the water. And and really the the the the city of Mobile expanded from the water inland rather than the other way around. How I mean we're we're probably what several hundred yards from the from the dock from where we are right now.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, from our dock, but if you went we've got a trail that goes right this direction in between some of the trees out in the distance, even though it's summer, I can still see a little bit of a river. So you're only like two hundred right here.
SPEAKER_00That's why I was asking, because I couldn't, I wasn't really sure if I was seeing river. You are. You are.
SPEAKER_03So there there's a there's a street here. There'd be a street on the other side of that pavilion, there'd be one more street actually closer to the river. And so th this this entire bluff, this entire riverfront was the heart of the town, and it expanded out from that. And basically, if you're in the park, you you are you're probably encountering some of those original roads. So all the way out to our entrance at 225 was part of the road system that connected you on to places like Pensacola and and and further north to Stockton. But the lots that were sold, this would have been the commercial heart, but just like any urban entity, you've got commercial heart, and then you've got extending out uh for for maybe a mile further in the other directions would have been your your residential lots.
SPEAKER_00And then when we go back and wind around to and I don't know as the crow flies how far we are and how it would have been from the standpoint of in that that day, but I know, of course, haven't even gotten to the Civil War and the big battle that took place here yet. And uh but but kind of almost across from where Redoubt number six is, yeah, is where there was a cemetery.
SPEAKER_03Town cemetery, yeah. Uh and we're actually having that uh ground penetrating radar studies going on right now to document how many more burials, because we know there are multiple more burials than we have stones. And the interesting part about it, and it's it's funny you mention that because I'm literally talking with the person doing the research today, is that that cemetery you can see from the main park road, which definitely is in the footprint of the old Pensacola Road, no doubt. Just so you're look you're going down an existing road and getting to the old town site, that shows up on maps even during the Civil War. But what's really interesting is that cemetery from that main road, the heart of it, is across the field, uh a good uh 150, 200 yards away. It's almost like it's oriented facing another old town road. And if you look at the GPR and the and the LIDAR studies, it does look like there's another road that branched around on either side of that, that we've sort of lost a lot of traces of that. But it just helps you understand that when you talk about a town and you come here and you see this one street, there are many more streets and byways and highways all in the area, and as far away as that, which is a mile away, you're basically talking about getting to the outskirts of the town of Blakely.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. And so how many uh at at its height, what what would have been roughly the population of great, great question that I do not have a definitive answer to.
SPEAKER_03I can tell you there's a lot of people that have it wrong uh in history books because there's some people that'll say, oh, Blakeley had 5,000 residents. Well, Mobile didn't even have that. So it definitely didn't have that. My personal estimation from everything that I know from the time period and every document I've ever seen and just knowing what's in the area, is I think at its height it was probably a a town of maybe 1,500 to 2,000 people. At the time that Mobile would have been a little bit more than that. So it was definitely a center of urban development, and 1500 to 2000 doesn't sound huge, except when you put it into context and you realize there's nothing else in the entire Mississippi Territory outside of Natchez that would have had a population like that that's an American settlement. So uh it is definitely one of the larger ones, but as far as putting a specific number, I'm unable to do it, but I I think it's lower than some of these estimates in the history books from the 20s.
SPEAKER_00So as we walk on around through here, what would these particular businesses that we're walking by here that you've got represented maybe may have been close to here, may not have been, but they were in the town. What were they? What did they do?
SPEAKER_03Dry goods, grocers, hardware, supplies of all times, ranging from guns to clothing to bushels of corn and all the things that you would need to make a living in this sort of area and be traded, you know, tools, axes, hose, all the things that you would expect to find in any sort of general dry goods store. That's what they're they're engaged in business selling.
SPEAKER_00Okay, and would the 1820s have been its height or would they it have continued growing on into the 30s, 40s, 50s?
SPEAKER_03Uh right around 1830 is when you you get to a point that it really starts to have a pivot point where it does begin to uh a slow decrease. Okay. Uh that so the commercial activity was sort of at its height around 1825.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_03Within a few years, you've got some of the things that lead to the the slow demise of the town beginning to happen. Episodes of of uh yellow fever, uh you know, Mobile getting serious about improving their port and not allowing some of the cotton and lumber that's coming to Blakely to be shipped out of their port. You put all that together and by 1832, 33, you got a drastically different place that suddenly instead of ascending, it's it's stagnant or descending. And by 1840, the whole thing was gone. Even the the port warden was his office was removed in the early 1830s and sent over to Mobile. So it happened relatively quickly.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it did. Yeah. And and then, you know, evidently there was still some degree of strategic importance because when you get into the 1860s, you've got a fort here.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. And and the fort, Fort Blakely, was of course not built to defend the community. So it's called Blakely because of the location, not because it's defending a place. What it's defending is access to the Tensaw River.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_03Uh so it it i the the federal forces at that time were targeting Mobile. They'd wanted to do that since 1862 for various reasons. They had been delayed. But when they finally put together the forces to come and try to capture Mobile, the commanding officer was given the option of, you know, do do you want to go directly into Mobile, face all those fortifications, and capture it immediately, or do you want to find a way to bypass it, go into central Alabama where Selma, which was a much more strategic target, they were Selma was still manufacturing probably about half of the of the uh uh armo or the ammo that the Confederacy was still firing. Uh and he said, no, I'm not gonna go and not gonna attempt to go into Interior Alabama and leave all this behind me. I'm gonna go ahead and make it make it attack it head on. Well the Confederates since the Battle of Mobile Bay was August of 1864, that's when they began to con uh construction of this and Spanish Fort. They wanted to make sure there was no option that you could not bypass Mobile. They wanted to make sure that you any federal invading force would have to deal with these and could not get up the river. So this was built to protect a back door to Mobile and also to protect that strategic route into interior Alabama. And when they did it, it's a three-mile-long series of earthworks. So it it's not around one place, it's not one square bastion, it's not in necessarily the old town of Blakeley, but the old town of Blakeley sits on this bluff, and that's that strategic spot. And so it's on a big arc that touches on the river on the north and south.
SPEAKER_00So the by that time, how much how big was Blakeley?
SPEAKER_03By that time, Blakeley was no longer a functioning town. There were certainly people in the in the in the area on farms. Even the maps show places like cornfields and things like that. So it was still a small community. Some of the buildings were still here. We we know that the Confederate Marines utilized them for storing supplies and other things that involved the logistics of the operation maintaining Blakely, but it was no longer a functioning community. So it's hard to say exactly because there's really no census information. But this thing would have been, it would have been a small collection of homesteads around what one at one time was an urban entity.
SPEAKER_00So when did it cease to be a really a functioning town?
SPEAKER_03That's another question I would love to be able to specifically pinpoint. Um I always used the the year 1840 because you you just don't see as much activity, commercial activity. It it if you look at the records, it's almost like everything was almost completely gone by 1840. But you don't have that that that definitive date where they closed up the doors and said Blakely's done. But you you definitely can see that it's on its way out as a community, as a functioning town by the mid-1830s. And when you see people arriving in the area by 1840, you you hear about stories about how some structures that were being built and some of the first settlers that are coming into the region were basically coming to the old town site and taking some of the brick foundations and polio that's going on. Yeah, there's there's some repurposing of these buildings, and so you put all that together and obviously you're not going to do that if it's a functioning community. Right, yeah, people aren't gonna let you take still park their house if they're actually using it. Exactly. So it's sort of anecdotal evidence that helps inform us. But about 1840 is when you kind of Blakely is is pretty much done.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Well now the at what point did it stop being the county seat?
SPEAKER_03That wasn't until after the 60 in uh after the Civil War. So 1868 is when it continued to be the county seat, which meant that basically sessions of court, which could be held, you know, quarterly or something like that, you could still gather and and hold it. You could still there were still functioning docks, you could get people here by boat, there were still roads that came through. So it was not this overgrown, out-of-the-way, washed-up place. There were still things happening. There were still a few people here, there was still the infrastructure and the buildings, the courthouse, and most of the time the people who were doing all that weren't there working every day, day-to-day in.
SPEAKER_00So it was an administrative center, and that's about it. It's not a it's not a commercial center, and certainly at this point sounds like the the steamboat manufacturing probably is already gone.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah, that had been gone in the early 1820s.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So then I think if I remember correctly, it's 1866, 1868 that the county seat gets moved from here down to what is now Daphne. It wasn't really incorporated, then it wasn't incorporated if I'm correct, until the 1920s. And and and that's an interesting story about how it gets from there to Baymanette, also. Yeah, basically stole the records of the room.
SPEAKER_03Right. They warded it up in Baymanette and they came and stole all this all the records in the middle of the night and took it up to Baymanette and suddenly it's the it's the county seat. So that that's a different story, but it is a it is an interesting local store.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So then when we get into what really was I'll call it the nail, the last nail in the coffin. What was that?
SPEAKER_03Uh as far as the town? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that well, the last nail in the coffin was the when you remove the port warden, it's no longer a place to bring goods or in or out, and you don't have a uh a really good system for exchange, then that that's its last piece of business. You know, the the dry goods stores can move, everything else can go, but the port can still function without a lot of that stuff. But when the business got to the point that there wasn't enough to maintain somebody to document and collect taxes and do all this stuff, you can see that that was it. They were all choosing to go over to Mobile at that point.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And and at what point would be the big yellow fever epidemic that really gutted it have been?
SPEAKER_03Well, there's more than one. There were at least three that were documented to take place between the 18 teens and I think it's 1828 or so is is the last big one. So, but I always tell people when we talk about that, uh, you know, Mobile was affected by yellow fever too. So yellow fever is not purely the blame. You have to look at the rest of the story. And in Mobile, you've got a community where you you've got a lot of people who had deep roots there, and they may leave town and they might come back during that yellow fever epidemic. A lot of people who were settling here were particularly large group of them, were from the Northeast, and this they moved down here right as this area opened up. Well, what do you do when there's a yellow fever scare and they say, you know, if you stick around, you're gonna get sick and die? You go you pick up, you move, you go somewhere else, and you may not come back because the Mississippi Territory is a huge area, a lot of indie developing settlements, a lot of riverfront towns, a lot of opportunities. And and and that's that's basically what happened. You've got this every time it hit, you get a few people leaving, a few more leaving, and they're not coming back. Right.
SPEAKER_00Well, I know, you know, t kind of tying to to your um you were talking about the the Battle of Mobile Bay in August of 1864. The the the guy who is the Union commander in that, David Farragut, was born in East Tennessee, born in uh just outside of Knoxville. His father had been Spanish, actually came and became an American citizen, fought for the American one, I mean, even though Spain fought on the side of the of the United States, and of course you I think maybe wrote a book about that. Uh but um hit the he takes a job as um, you know, with the with the port in in New Orleans, and they move down to the coast. Farragut's mom dies in Pascagoula in a yellow fever epidemic. He ends up being more or less adopted by a David Porter, and that launches his naval career. He's a midshipman at 10 years old.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, and and spends his life in the Navy, but it it's it's actually tied to this area not too far from here anyway, and to the very thing we were talking about with this. But exactly what you're mentioning, you know, you've got opportunity. They left Knoxville to go to New Orleans as this is opening up in the in the early 1800s, like 18 probably uh 18, late 18s, not quite to the 18 teens yet, more than likely. I I'd have to go back and look at my notes to remember exactly when that was. But it's by the by the war of 1812, he's already adopted and is is uh and is with Porter serving as a midshipman in the in the U.S. Navy. So so but this area, um, you know, basically it was a boomtown, in other words. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03It was a boomtown for for a brief period of time. It was a good representative of what was taking place on what we call Alabama, which at one point would have been an epicenter of Western migration on the frontier of what we would have we we recognize the deep south, they would have at the time saw it as the nation's southwestern frontier.
SPEAKER_00Correct. Yeah, and and and and for our listeners, this area, and we're not too far from really where that would have been called the old Southwest. It's a little west of here, but it you know, you're what uh how far are we from where Fort Stoddart would have been?
SPEAKER_03Oh, we're probably about um 35, 40 miles at most.
SPEAKER_00And that was the original terminus of the federal of the federal road coming down through Creek Territory. Yeah. So uh from Milledgeville, Georgia, across and and if I remember correctly from your book, it followed give or take from from from Montgomery to here, essentially basically the same route that 65 follows today.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Um I-65 follows that route, and that that was a route that was not arbitrary, it was because it it actually follows a little ridge that that you got some relatively high ground. You can't appreciate it from 65, but if you're traveling by foot, you've got watersheds on either side of this, and that's what the old Indian trails and the trading paths follow. They they wanted to avoid making these stream crossings and going through swamps, etc. And so those trails end up following some of these trading paths, and and and that really you go back even further, some of these are old um animal trails, sure, uh bison and all these things. So you're when you're on those trail systems, you're it's not an arbitrary place through the woods. These are things that have been developed over centuries.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, the Indians, too, you know, not being idiots themselves, realize that the animals already know the best way to get through. So they follow that trail, and then the white comes along, whites come along and they follow the trail that the Indians did. And so when the federal road was being built, it starts off as a post road. It's basically four feet wide, assuming that's maintained in a lot of places it wasn't. By the time we're getting on up to the time period approaching the um more of 1812, United States is realizing, hey, we've got to be able to administer this vast new territory that Jefferson's gotten for us. And the, you know, it's kind of the the Indians, the creeks are the main tribe in the area. They're realizing, you know, the you got to watch the U.S. government. They'll tell you they want four feet, and the next thing you know, they want four times that because here comes a four-a 16-foot wide widening of it so they can get wagons through to be able to. And and and the thing is, when it's a post road, it's hard to be used by settlers. But when it's 16 feet wide for the wagons to get through for the U.S. Army, the same thing can be used for settlers coming through with their own wagons. They did.
SPEAKER_03It became an immigration superhighway, as I like to describe it. It became the the primary route. So you're following along a lot of what's the interstate today, 85 and 65, and that's the way they would have looked at it at the time. It's the major land artery connecting areas of the country, and there was a a uh you know, uh a group of a large amount of traffic that they would have seen as just as as congested. Like they could not imagine how many people are pouring into their territory, the creeks could on that new highway.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Okay, and so how did that inform the development of Blakeland?
SPEAKER_03Well i i i in in the big picture what it did was it brought a lot of American settlers to the area just to the north. And of course, as we discussed earlier, they wanted trade, they want international markets for their per uh productions and things out and throughout the world by boat. And how do you do that? You go through the Portomobile and the lower ends of these riverways, you get into Mobile Bay and you go on. So mm-hmm when Blakely's founded to take advantage of all that, you already have uh some pent-up demand just to the north. Okay. So you've got you're you're in an area that has already had a lot of the uh the development that kind of sets the stage for it to be a prosperous trading town.
SPEAKER_00Did the Ellicott Line come all the way across over here?
SPEAKER_03Uh the yeah, well the Ellicott Line is of course to our north 31st parallel.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_03So it yeah, it it it it cut all the way from the Mississippi River all the way over to the Chattahoochee. In this area, it would have gone through Mobile and Baldwin counties. Where it goes through the Delta, which is directly north of here. Uh Ellicott had some ingenious methods for doing that. You he he was not able to get out and walk through all the swamps and the rivers, but he would wait for clear days uh with a little wind, and they would set fires in line and he could see the smoke rising, and he could trace through all his his complicated workings on figuring out where he was with latitude based on some of that. So that he got an interesting way to get through the delta, but once you get on the other side of the tensor, Baldwin County, he continued on, he actually put some mounds in place to help mark the place. The one thing that's left in this area that is most associated with that survey is of course the stone that he left in Mobile County. There's an Alcott stone, it's literally placed stone marker placed by him during that survey, and on one side it says property of the United States, and the other side is property of the King of Spain. So you can go to the exact spot and connect with that story and and and actually where they were on that survey. And the amazing thing is he did that in what 1799, 1800, and he's only a few hundred feet off with modern equipment. We we it's amazing how close he was to being dead on.
SPEAKER_00And and so, but we are definitely south of that line.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah, we're south of that line.
SPEAKER_00And and that's that's where I was looking at so that that that pent-up demand, they still couldn't have gotten here because we're down below back.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we're we're in Spanish territory before that. Yeah. So this officially became part of the United States after 1813 when we acquired it from Spain. And so this this immediately was annexed uh into the Mississippi Territory. The Mississippi Territory of Government before that had even posted, had even uh uh designated some officials that were supposed to do certain uh governmental roles in Mobile, even though Spain still held Mobile. So they had appointed officials, even though they really couldn't exercise any jurisdiction because that's how much confidence they had. Spain was either going to relinquish it or they were gonna take it. So they had not done that necessarily on the other side of the bay, which is where we're at, but clearly. They had plans that this was going to be United States property soon. A lot of pressure applied.
SPEAKER_00And that was, I think, probably a big part of the reason you had people like Toulman who, when you've got loose cannons like Kemper running around, are trying to keep those guys from messing everything up, mucking around trying to add it on to West Florida, and they're like, no, no, no, we're not gonna, we're not gonna, we're not gonna get a lot of Spanish troops in here where we've got a harder job when we're ready to do what we want to do.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Uh Tulman was all about law and order and and following procedure. And he, like everybody else, assumed there would be a time that this came into United States possession. Why, why mess things up? And and and and you're only gonna slow down that process by just purposely infuriating the Spaniards and and uh and and acting like you're gonna form a rebellion. Because what happened over in in Louisiana at Baton Rouge, they they talked as if they would do the same thing here, and it really was a bunch of blowhards, and they got together and they they they drank and they talked and they pretended they were doing something. They never made any organized attempt except to get together and camp and talk. But Spain had enough of it, and they sent an expedition up the river from Mobile and actually captured these guys, had a little firefight in the middle of the night, shot some of them, captured some of them, sent them over to Moro Castle in in Havana. So they put an end to it, but they did that because American officials were cooperating on the intelligence of it. So it's an odd situation. It's an area that the United States wants, but yet they're working technically to maintain Spanish sovereignty because they thought that was the best path forward. You didn't need a reveal a revolution and a revolt to capture Mobile. If you played your cards right, maybe they give you the thing outright.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And and so that all goes down in 1813, 1814, they're here. Oh yeah. What was the strategic importance to the United States of Blakely at that point?
SPEAKER_03Well, uh again, you talk about context. So you've got now another trading hub on the opposite side of the Delta. It's not only on that strategic spot on the river where you've got this bluff and this landing, so it gives you access, greater access to the river system. But remember, the roads that come through here, this was a terminus of of of some stage roads. You've got a road that goes to Pensacola. It's the very road that Andrew Jackson traveled in when he went to become the governor of the Florida Territory. And you've also got a road that goes north to Stockton, which really ultimately connects with the Federal Road. So this is this is a land transportation hub as well. So you when you've got land and water routes that connect here, it becomes a very strategic spot for a lot of reasons. Just regional travel and of course economics. And there was actually a a ferry that was that was established that ran, uh the Emma Line was its name, and it ran between Blakely and Mobile regularly. Uh in the late 1800s, early 1820s. I can't say the exact date that it stopped running, but it ran for a period of time that connected these communities. So travelers, you might end your stage road, your stage travel here, and you get on the ferry and go to Mobile to continue whatever your journeys are. So that was happening and connecting these areas. So it kind of shows that this area was becoming interconnected. Mobile and Eastern Shore have this long history that goes back much longer than people even realize of being an interconnected community.
SPEAKER_00Alright, so what I'm gonna do now is probably something that's gonna make you cringe. Uh-uh. I'm gonna play a little alternative history game here just for a second. Let's assume just for a moment that by the 1840s, instead of this having essentially died out, it's grown. How does that change the history of the area?
SPEAKER_03Uh that's that's a good question. Um I I think that it would have hastened the uh the development of the area because after it's gone, you really never have another major community on the Tinsaw River, even today. We still don't. Uh but you've got an influx of people that are coming here now. But that that that was a slow developing thing. You know, Baldwin County did not grow very fast until you get into the 1900s. I I do wonder if it would have helped spur that a little earlier, at least in this one area. Um, it might have been developed uh quicker, earlier, and might have changed a little bit about the strategic uh uh plans and the Civil War even uh because you you would have had a a major community and that maybe Fort Blakeley might have been in the same place, but the town of Blakely might have been more of a target at that point if had that been allowed to grow like that. So it's all kinds of interesting games you can play with that or and think about how it would have changed history, but uh to have a thriving commercial port had it not taken the the turn it did and had it continued to grow would have been a really interesting dynamic to have major communities on either side of the bay.
SPEAKER_00Knowing how the population growth has been in the area from the I'll say late mid-20th century onward, of course it was, you know, Mobile was a huge uh area of of development around uh with with the World War II effort producing shipping. And you look at urban sprawl the way it happens nowadays, think Atlanta, think you know, any any major city. I mean, you would be easily where you would can could could potentially have a Blakely Mobile Twin City kind of urban area if that had happened. What does that look like to the Mobile Bay?
SPEAKER_03You know, um that that's a good question. You know, right now where we're at today, we've got we've got that one maintained shipping channel that goes up to Mobile. Pretty pretty big in Deafer. Endeavor uh it employs a lot of people and there's a lot it has to go into maintaining a 45 foot deep shipping channel in a bay that's usually about seven or eight feet deep. It's not all that deep. Um I I do wonder had Blakeley taken off, what would have been the impact? Would it would have slowed down anything mobile or would it sped up things at Blakeley? Uh who knows? Uh but I could easily see a uh a point in time if Blakeley had continued to grow where maybe it never gets to be the quite the shipyards that Mobile is. But I could see that there might be a reason to maintain some commercial route for for shipping that if if it didn't connect its own route all the way to the it to the to the um to to Mobile Point, maybe there was a connection across the bay to connect with Mobile. I I could see something like that have been necessary if it continued its growth.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well I know I know when you say alternative history, normally a a real historian goes, ooh.
SPEAKER_03I enjoy thinking about those things.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well and and it is fun to think about it. The the big the big thing is when you start saying definitively this would have happened and this would have happened, you can't you can't say that because you have no idea what other variables would have come into play as well. So that's right. We've we've walked around the area, we've you know, I mean we're we're what now about 50, 60 yards from the hang the quote hanging tree. I'm I'm gonna put that in quotes.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_00What have I not asked you that I should have asked you about Blakely?
SPEAKER_03Well the the thing that I wish I could do bit a better job of as most intriguing to me is explaining daily life. We don't have a lot of really good records about I don't have a lot of letters and and I I've got a newspaper, I've got some some accounts, some official accounts of shipping and military stuff, but I I I wish I could do better at at telling people what their day-to-day existence is like, what's it like to live in these small homes, uh, what what did they trade for, what did they eat. We've tried to establish a little bit of that sort of interpretation and the part with doing some living history that focuses on food ways, some people preparing foods of the time period. But just the to get a feel of how people lived is is is something that I I find personally intriguing. A lot of groups will ask me. So I I I tell them what I know of the time period. I wish I had more to tell you right here. This was happening. Uh so we when we talk about that, we're having to pull together a lot that we know in the southeast in general. Um that that's the one thing that I'm gonna say.
SPEAKER_00About the closest thing you can do is say city life in 1825, look at what it was like in Mobile. Exactly, and and and infer that it would have been similar here, uh, which probably is true. Probably, but there's gonna be some variables.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, there definitely would be some variables. And right here you've got Blakely had abundant supplies of fresh water, which is something that Mobile did not have quite as much of. You've got people from a different area overall. I mean, it's not like they're drastically different, but you've got a concentration of people arriving here from the Northeast with specific uh, you know, lifestyles, architectural styles, religious viewpoints, etc. So I'd be really interested to know more about how they viewed themselves and what they were establishing versus what was across the bay. There had to be a little bit of rivalry and difference, you know, between those two communities. And I just don't have a lot of documentation, but you put it all together and you can infer that they probably would have seen themselves as establishing a little bit of a different sort of community than what was overmobile, which was founded by the French and had gone through British and Spanish rule, and it was it was viewed as sort of a northernmost point in the Caribbean as much as it's a southernmost point in the United States. Right. So you think about Blakely, this is a brand new, 100% American town. That some of the leading players are from the Northeast. We're talking guys from with Puritan background, so would have been a little bit of a so different social dynamic.
SPEAKER_00And and and a very different um so you you go to Boston, you go to um Providence, you go to, you know, any place in the New England seaboard up there, and the way they do things, build things, conduct their daily business, quite different from the way it is in the South. And you've got those guys, and he was what, Connecticut?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So he's coming from Connecticut. So the way they do things in Hartford, he comes down here, he's bringing with him what he knows. Exactly. And so, so yeah, I mean, you don't have, I mean, you know, one of the interesting things, and this is my my wife being, you know, all about the the big ceremonial type stuff for her, it's fascinating that that Mondi Gras and Mobile is older even than New Orleans, let alone Mondi Gras, New Orleans. It's older than even New Orleans itself. So they have that heritage. And one of the other things that kind of went through my mind as you were talking, I'm thinking alternative history. What if the French had gone up a different river? What if they'd gone up this one instead of the Mobile River and established what became Mobile here? You know, that that's another another alternative idea that that you could come out of that. And oh, by the way, that makes things easier then for the Spanish when they take it over because it's closer to Pensacola. You know, it's closer. Oh, definitely. So definitely. So, you know, it it it may have it may have changed things dramatically. That that that's um a perhaps a uh an alternative journey for another time, but but yeah, the the there would have been a very different feel here. I mean, you've got a very colonial feel in Old Mobile, yeah. That didn't exist here.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, it's this is a brand new place founded by people with different ideas a century later. So uh it is it is interesting to to to contemplate what might have been been allowed to continue, what sort of dynamics there would have been on these cross bay sister cities.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Well what do you you know you were talking about the the the scarcity of materials. Do you have a plat of the town site?
SPEAKER_03Well, I've got a plat of of one of the extensions when it began to grow in the 1820s, and uh by all that I know it probably was echoing what was already in place. So I've got some concept um of what the streetscape would have looked like. We also have a few parcels that because of some archaeological projects, we've managed to lay out on the landscape, and it's not complete, but gives you some idea of where the major roads were and how to tie everything together. And what's amazing is that the road system in the park and everything you look at, it echoes the 1820s. I mean, it it we are following a lot of what was already here. So uh so it does it does help you understand the layout of the place a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Well, I know the first time I came in here I got lost as last year's Easter egg trying to figure out how to get around through here or something.
SPEAKER_03Well, and and you know, some of that is because it you you you're going, you know, south and then you turn the room. Yeah, there's no there's no direct the the landmarks are all gone. Right. But had you been traveling and you went past the cemetery and you made it to a house and a courthouse, it would it would piece it together and it made more sense. So I think we're looking at the the bones of a community and we're still working to try to reconstruct why those road that road system works the way it does.
SPEAKER_00That's that's that's an interesting thought. And I I mean you see that everywhere. Yeah. You see that everywhere. So one last thing, I know you're probably getting close to time. We've been at this now for we've been at it about an hour. So the courthouse. Yeah. How long was I know you've got pictures over there that show the courthouse even, or I've seen them somewhere even as uh uh there's a structure here, early 1900s. Not being used anymore, obviously, by that time the county seats been moved to Daphne and then to in the middle of the night to Baymanette. But how long did the old building last?
SPEAKER_03Well, there are a few photos of people visiting the area and the and the wall, the front wall of the courthouse is still there around 1900. Uh I don't have many photos that help me understand exactly when that front wall collapsed, but uh the majority of the building had already apparently collapsed by then. So it's it's again it's tough to say, but it looks as if once they pulled out in 1868 there was no maintenance or there were people taking supplies and and then the thing was just disappearing. So free bricks. Yeah, free bricks. And uh my my my best guess is by 1910, 1920, uh you don't have anything standing that's visible. You got piles of bricks around there. That's just my guess, but when you put together the few accounts of people traveling through, nobody mentions a standing structure by that time. But they do, for example, even in the eighteen eighties I I ran across a notice um from Mobile of an excursion, a steamboat excursion to visit Old Bakery. That is like a day a picnic, uh uh, you know, like a daytime come explore the ruins of this old place. So it was a tourist attraction for a hundred years before it became a state park. So that's what I get out of that. But there's no mention of of of walking streets where there's a bunch of standing structures and the shells are there. I think most of that had been removed, pillaged, uh, plundered, or fallen in. I I think it I think it went pretty quickly, weren't people maintained?
SPEAKER_00Weren't weren't that's not necessarily abnormal for structures, especially on the coast dealing with the storms and all the things that you deal with. Without treated wood. Without treated wood. I mean it's there's nothing to continue. I mean all that would have held up would have been in the the bricks and mortar, and once there was nothing supporting them, you know, um anything would have caused it to fall over. So all right, so so you are the director of the park. Yep. Gonna ask you to get your crystal ball out now. Okay. What's the future?
SPEAKER_03Well, uh, for the park.
SPEAKER_00For the park, for the for for you know, the Blakely site in particular, and of course you're talking, you you know, mentioned earlier the you're already looking at the old um cemetery, trying to identify where those graves are, those kinds of things. So what's the future?
SPEAKER_03We're we're going to continue to interpret uh what we have here, this incredible history, through a variety of ways. You know, we built some ghost structures, we'll probably build some more of those. There'll be additional tour options and programs focusing on this history. We are um working towards building an interpretive center right now, so it'll be a new staff complex and a place for events, but also have a museum of some scale. It won't be a you know the Smithsonian, but we're going to have some place to display objects and talk about history and prepare you as you go out to explore the park. That's in the works. We're also adding ag um, you know, recreational amenities in this area. We'll be adding some actually floating cabins, uh some houses on the water that you can rent. So it will bring a new dynamic to recreation here. We're gonna improve our boardwalks and there's so there's a lot that's already going on the old town site. But over time I could see us opening it up a little bit with a few more spots to walk and explore, a little bit better and more riverfront access that brings a little bit of new dynamic of people visiting the site. But at at its heart, we're gonna work to preserve anything that we can that that we can identify, and we're gonna work to interpret it in every way that we know how to keep it relevant to new audiences over time. So that's our mission is to preserve and protect and and promote and educate. And so we're gonna continue to continue to do that as we provide some of those recreational amenities that make a weekend stay versus just a daytime hike an option for people.
SPEAKER_00And I and uh so for our listeners, I do want to make mention, we were supposed to have also had with us on this interview today eminent historian John Sledge, who is the resident historian at the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf and Mobile, but is also a very good friend of Blakely Park.
SPEAKER_03He does a lot of the of the Delta Explorer tours that tours for us and uh serves on the board of our foundation. Good friend.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you know the to the the point I'm making here as people are listening to this interview later, and this is I want to give you a venue to talk and kind of promote your your the things you're doing in the park here as well, because I think it's important that people understand what your vision is and where you're going with it, because what what we're trying to do here, and the reason I tell these stories is preserve to preserve them, because to your point, you have no written record and there are precious few even official documents about what was going on here, but you have no no, you know, haven't found any diaries, haven't found any kind of letters or anything like that that say here's what life was like in Blakely in 1825. So without preserving those stories, that disappears. And you know, you could you could walk through this area right now, literally, if they hadn't dug up the the the foundation of the old courthouse and put a structure over it, if they hadn't put these ghost structures up here, you literally could walk through here now and never know that there was a a bustling town here 200 years ago. So so that's that's the kind of thing that that by saving these stories this way. Tell me about what your vision is for the interpretive center that you're looking to build and maybe what a timeline is on that.
SPEAKER_03We we estimate and and you know when you're building anything big, the timelines go out the window quick. But I'm hoping that we're moving towards groundbreaking sometime in late 2027. That's what I hope. Okay. But it it will be a facility where we'll have we we've got to add some staff, so it'll be a place for staff. We need new offices. It will have a uh a community heritage room of some sort. We work in we're we're working with the Baldwin County Historical Society about becoming sort of the institutional whole for that organization, which was founded here in Blakely in the 1920s. Their first meeting took place here. And so that's a countywide historical organization. And so, in some way that we have not 100% identified everything, there will be some sort of community heritage center that that's based with the the County Historical Society's holdings that we incorporate into that. We'll have an event center where we can do a lot of the programming lectures and educational events, especially ones that that that we want to have take place even if it's raining, because right now we're very very weather dependent. We we'll have a place that we can can still uh talk with people about the history and the heritage here. And and the real the the real highlight of the whole thing is that we're gonna have uh a museum that that will help you understand life at the Blakely site from thousands of years ago um to today, and it'll focus on A lot, of course, on the Civil War story and the Blakely story. We'll talk about uh you know indigenous residents going back to the Woodland period 2,000 years ago. We'll talk a little bit about the Mississippian period, we'll talk about the Appalachian Indians who were here, the colonial settlers. And our goal with that museum is not to make it a standalone walk and see the entire story. What we want to do is use what we have with objects and with some creativity and images to help prepare you to fully appreciate the site. We want to integrate completely with your visit. So we don't want to be detached from it. We don't want you to go to the museum and feel like you know everything. We don't want you to go to the to the site and feel like you're missing something. We want to pair those two together in a creative way and use that as a as an introduction to a story that you really can best understand by exploring the landscape. That's our goal.
SPEAKER_00So to our listeners, one of the things I want to talk about here with what Mike just said, this is Blakely State Park. It is called historic Blakely State Park, and it's called that for a reason, because you have literally uh I'll I'll say over a thousand years of history here, you know, pre-history, of course, because there wasn't any written record of that, but but you know, you're not very far. He mentioned Stockton earlier. Uh it's not very far from Stockton where the Bottle Creek site is, where there are 18 mounds there that the Bottle Creek tribe constructed. We don't know what their name would have been. If, you know, are they the forerunners of the creeks? I don't know that anybody really knows that. Uh, or was it Creek Indians in their early days? I don't I don't know if there's been any connection um totally with that, uh, or Muscogee uh more appropriately. But but what we're looking at here is that um this this goes through the colonial period, through early American um development into this area from a Mississippi territory on into Alabama territory, on into state of Alabama, into Civil War, into, you know, all the way up into, you know, talking New Deal type stuff going on in the 1930s where the area is being developed. Um I presume that there were some WPA and CCC kinds of things going on in the area, like there were in a lot of other areas.
SPEAKER_03Not on the park itself, because the park didn't become a park until the 1980s.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah. But but in in this particular area, per se, and and and of course Blakely itself, you know, it may not may not have been within the footprint of the park itself, but it would have been, you know, I'll say, kind of spokes of a wheel coming out from it almost into so uh there's especially when you consider what what Mike's already talked about, that the road system, the park's roads are the area roads, yeah, yeah. Uh from from that time period. So um, so so to that point, Mike, how if somebody is interested, they they've listened to this, they said, man, that's really cool. I would like to be a part of that. What do they need to do?
SPEAKER_03Go to Blakeleypark.com. You'll find all of our rental facilities or can be rented online. You'll find tickets to overboat cruises, you'll find a listing of all our events, and you also find a tab that is called Support Blakely that will give you some options if you're interested in becoming a friend of the park, which comes with some some free admission benefits and comes you with some recognition at different giving levels. We'll have a corporate sponsorship link. And if you just want to just straight out donate and say that's a neat idea and a neat concept, but you're not able to get here, those options are there as well. So that support Blakely tab will help you get connected in the long term with us in some way.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Anything else as we're, I think, winding down here, anything else you'd like to add uh for our listeners to hear?
SPEAKER_03Uh well, I just appreciate your interest in the site and those who are listening. I appreciate their interest in history. Um, I'm a historian and I just find the layers of history here fascinating. We we can connect with literally every era of human habitation in this area, and in the Mobile Bay area, that's saying a lot. And we've got stories to tell, and we're doing it on a massive park, 2,000 acres. It's really uh undisturbed. Um you've got a lot of original wilderness, a lot of archaeological sites. You don't have a lot of the built environment, but what we're trying to do is strategically make that come alive in your mind's eye by reconstructing a few things and informing you what we're doing. We're not trying to, you know, make it appear that it's a complete original structure, but we want to help you understand it. So um we're working hard to keep all this history preserved and interpreted, and I just appreciate people who are interested in learning about that and and and sharing in that journey with us.
SPEAKER_00Well, let me let me jump in real quick here on something. We haven't talked much about the Civil War because that wasn't really within the scope of what we were doing here, but I will tell you, as someone who has traveled around a good bit, of course, I grew up in Tennessee, live in Tennessee, and I mean the Civil War is everywhere there. These are some of the best preserved earthworks I have ever seen. I mean, they are very, very well preserved. So if you want to be able to walk through and see that kind of thing. And oh, by the way, if you've got some sort of LiDAR app where you can see exactly how those, I mean, you can follow it and it's still there. We've got miles of them, miles of them. So, so um, so so just know that that all that is here, and and Mike, thank you so very much for taking this time. I know you're a very, very busy man. Um, and and we we mentioned that at the outset. So I know this was not really, I mean, you you this is one of those things that's do you have time? No, I'll make time. You made time for this, and I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03I appreciate that. And uh, yeah, I am busy, but this is what keeps me going is this is the heart and soul of it, communicating what we have to people, so I'm always ready to make time to do that. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Well, very good. Thank you so much. Thank you, appreciate you, thank you.