“The Mobile River”
Author: John S. Sledge
Publisher: The University of South Carolina Press
Pages: 304
Price: $34.95 (Hardcover)
John Sledge, senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission, in addition to his collection “Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgimages of the Heart,” has already written books, fairly narrow in scope, on Mobile ironwork, Mobile cemetery art and Greek revival architecture in Mobile.
Now he has produced a truly impressive, monumental history of this short—it is only 45 miles long—but historically important waterway. There have been studies of other Alabama rivers, he reminds us, but “the Mobile River gets no respect. It is a workingman’s river, broadshouldered, unglamorous, dirty, and rarely considered.”
But as one reads along in Sledge’s deeply researched and gracefully written study, it becomes clear that a mountain of history took place on that 45-mile stretch and the book gives more than it promised. The history of the Mobile River is the story of the city of Mobile, of the slaves, freedmen, Indians, Creoles, Cajuns, mulattoes, Spaniards, French and Americans who shaped it. The book is military history, maritime history, a history of commerce, immigration and race relations, even agriculture in that region. One learns about sinking pilings and building piers and the dangers of “sawyers” and “deadheads’” and comes away with a hugely enlarged appreciation for the dangers the river presents and with a new awareness of the complexity in the history of Alabama’s Port City.
A reviewer cannot summarize a volume that covers centuries of history. Some odd bits stick in the mind. The Indians played a kind of fierce lacrosse, “the little brother of war,” which “held great importance within their culture.” A nineteenth-century report of a game day describes “a player killed outright on the fields, three badly hurt who died later, and more than a dozen who took better than a month to recover.” Teams then, as now, lost players to injuries.
Sledge covers the Spanish and French settlements and paints a detailed picture of just how rough life was. The Mobile River area had and still has a most difficult climate, with steaming heat and humidity.
Fever was common in the summer and in winter settlers suffered: “fluxes, dropsies, and cachexies. Men died in alarming numbers.” Sledge reports “one merchant dubbed it ‘the most disagreeable and unhealthy place in America,’” “‘A graveyard for Britons.’”
(It is always appropriate to send up a word of thanks for air conditioning.)
Only the strong stayed and survived. A letter to President Jefferson read, “The present inhabitants …are illiterate, wild and savage, of depraved morals, unworthy of public confidence or private esteem; litigious, disunited, and knowing each other, universally distrustful.”
Sledge has a solid chapter on the Creek Indian War and moves on to Mobile’s Golden Age, the cotton era, which changed the Deep South world. The port grew exponentially, the population swelled, slavery expanded and the Civil War was not to be avoided by a society that depended on exporting slave-grown cotton.
The Civil War, on land and water, gets excellent summary here .We learn of the submarine Hunley, ironclads in the Bay, and Farragut.
Another odd fact: once the blockade was in place Mobilians really missed imported New England ice.
The port was largely ruined by the war: both the defenses and the damage impeded ship traffic. The damaged wharfs and warehouses had to be cleared and rebuilt. An interesting controversy previously unknown to me was the dispute over whether to use dredging, a tedious process, or scouring, guiding the river current to deepen the channel. Spoiler: go with dredging—the Mobile River current was never swift enough to scour itself.
All through the twentieth century, the river, wharves and port were improved but it was slow going.
Sledge reminds us, in 1919 “Birmingham industrial interests were fully behind [state financing], but rural voters turned it down, worried, as ever, that they would be taxed for benefits they would never realize.”
But the Port was developed, tunnels and bridges were constructed, the Eastern Shore opened up for commuters. There was progress—in some specific cases, too much.
Urban renewal in the 60s and 70s leveled “all of the historic brick warehouses, cotton presses, and office buildings along Front, Commerce and Water streets”—what preservationists would call “a wonderland of mid- to-late-nineteenth-century commercial architecture rich in elegant design and superior building materials including marble, granite, cast iron, and huge heart-pine sills and joists.”
Mobile was robbed of “the distinctive historical ambiance that cities such as Savannah, Georgia, and New Orleans later showed could be turned into tourist gold and world fame.” Sledge quotes one local architect on the destruction of much of the old town to build roads and tunnels: “We now have excellent access to a place we no longer want to go.”
Sledge’s “Mobile River” is rewarding reading and is enhanced by photographs, maps, drawings and gorgeous color plates, many of them reproductions of oil paintings of personages such as Cudjo Lewis, the last of the Clotilda’s smuggled slaves.
To close with another odd fact. Geronimo and 354 other surviving Apaches lived in north Mobile County for seven years. These were really tough folk, but they couldn’t stand the climate. Suffering from consumption, fevers, malaria and dysentery, the Apaches were removed to Oklahoma.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
