Bicentennial book delves into Tuscaloosa’s origin, growth

This story was updated Oct. 1 to add a rescheduled event.

Whether lifelong Tuscaloosans, or relatively recent — 20 years — transplants, readers of G. Ward Hubbs’ “Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making” express similar reactions:

I didn’t know that. Did you know that?

Even history professors, such as Kari Frederickson, found the University of Alabama Press book revelatory. Moving from Wisconsin in 1999 to teach at UA, she sought to learn more about her adopted city, but found little.

So when the Tuscaloosa Bicentennial Commission decided it wanted someone to write a history of the city to coincide with its 200th anniversary this year, Frederickson, a member of the commission, suggested Hubbs, believing he was the perfect person to tell more. First, he’d done a lot of the primary research.

“Also, we had the benefit of him being retired,” Frederickson said, laughing. Tuscaloosan Hubbs is professor emeritus from Birmingham-Southern College. “And he works incredibly fast; he got that manuscript done in less than a year.”

Cathy Randall, one of the bicentennial commission co-chairs, said Hubbs had free rein, no oversight from the commission, to write unvarnished truth. Hubbs’ work speaks to the overarching reasons for the bicentennial celebrations, she said, ”... to show a community coming together: Where we’ve been, where we are now, and perhaps where we can go in the future. To look back so that we can look forward.”

Learning the past can help ensure Tuscaloosa continues to improve for all, she added. A community that knows its history can avoid repeating mistakes, echoing philosopher and essayist George Santayana’s lines: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

“I think every community could benefit from an informed, scholarly history of its past, one that is not hagiography,” Frederickson said.

In studying the 200 years since the city’s incorporation on Dec. 13, 1819, Hubbs defined six moments of choice that resulted in wide, often unforeseen ripple effects. Those naturally enough became the book’s six chapters: “Tuscaloosans secure the state capital ... only to lose it,” “Tuscaloosans become citizens of the Confederacy ... and reap the whirlwind,” “Tuscaloosans recruit smokestack industries ... doggedly,” “Tuscaloosans transform their everyday lives ... by building a modern city,” “Tuscaloosans see the world ... and vice versa,” and “Tuscaloosans endure six minutes ... and everyone comes to lend a hand.”

“You will find only a small collection of mayors mentioned in here,” Frederickson said. “It’s not a parade of great, wealthy, important people, the chamber of commerce; it’s the story of ordinary people.”

Though he’d done research over decades here, the author found the scope daunting.

“This was very difficult for me. I generally deal with really, really micro-events, like four people meeting on a street in 1868 Tuscaloosa,” Hubbs said. “Here we’re dealing with 200 years, hundreds of thousands of people coming and going.

“But it all goes back to my approach to studying the past: I can’t just write about a succession of events or people, and I certainly wasn’t going to write a geneaology of mayors. I can’t abide that stuff.

“I’m interested in basically why people do things.”

So Hubbs pulled back to study whys: Why did Tuscaloosa get the capital, and why then, 20 years later, was it moved to Montgomery? Why did Tuscaloosa land on this particular spot? Why did Tuscaloosa attempt to become another Birmingham, and why did those efforts sputter?

“It didn’t take too long for me to see that these were the results of a few, very big decisions,” Hubbs said. “Some were conscious choices, some unconscious; some were worked out over decades. Some they knew exactly what they were doing, but nearly every decision had unforeseen consequences.”

When the capital departed Tuscaloosa, it left the city depleted, and isolated. Joining the Confederacy was disastrous; choosing to make the University a military academy painted a target on it for Union forces. With roughly a third of its population vanished, houses and buildings abandoned, the city decided “Let’s become Birmingham,” though the same Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad that ran eventually through Tuscaloosa also rumbled through Jones Valley, where it crossed another rail line running north-south between Nashville and Montgomery, near the village of Elyton, in the process of renaming itself Birmingham, after the English steelmaking center.

Much as we think of the river as central to our existence, the Black Warrior once was navigable only part of the year. At times, a person could walk across from Tuscaloosa to the northern port.

“The University didn’t open until October, because nobody could get here, the river was so low,” Hubbs said. Roads and railroads spread wider across central and eastern parts of the state, which were oveflowing with immigrants as the Creeks were driven off their land.

Critic and UA English Professor Emeritus Don Noble loved Hubbs’ approach, and the accessibility of his prose. In his review published in The Tuscaloosa News, Noble wrote: “Tuscaloosans SHOULD read this book for pleasure and to learn how we got here, now, this red-hot minute.”

“Before the railroad (which came in 1871), this place was really hard to get to,” said Noble, host of long-running Alabama Public Television series “Bookmark with Don Noble.” “That’s one of the reasons it was selected as a prisoner-of-war camp in the Civil War. If some poor Yankee escaped, he’d be out in the middle of nowhere. Tuscaloosa was sort of out of it.”

Noble also appreciated how Hubbs spotted ripples. Twice in the city’s history, once after the capital left, then again after the Civil War, “This place really languished. The population went way down, stores closed. One oddness was that nobody needed to build new buildings, because a lot of them were empty.”

So many of our older dwellings along Queen City Avenue, along 12th and 13th streets and elsewhere, survived in part because they’d been abandoned by a departing populace. No one could afford to tear down and build new.

Hubbs weaves in mostly forgotten stories, like how the falls, before the lock and dam system, before the noise pollution of industries and automobiles, created a continual rushing that could be heard for miles around.

“Apparently it was a hugely pleasing sound, this soothing white noise,” Noble said.

“All these young men would go out and write poetry to their girlfriends” inspired by the falls, Hubbs said, a “soft hush that blanketed the city 24 hours a day.”

The advent of bicycles liberated Tuscaloosa women in ways that horse-and-carriages couldn’t, before the advent of the Model T, creating wheelwomen. “I’m going out on my wheel” meant a ride on the bike, as there weren’t many wheels to compare with, at the time.

“The bicycle was overshadowed by the automobile, which comes in like 10 years later,” Hubbs said, “but it was the bicycle that got the good-roads movement going. Bicyclists were petitioning Congress long before the automobile ever hit.”

Before bikes, Tuscaloosa women weren’t terribly mobile. Hooking up a wagon, or even saddling a horse, took considerable effort, and perhaps a second or third pair of hands.

“When bicycles hit Tuscaloosa, girls got bicycles. And no one could stop ’em from going anywhere!” Noble said, laughing. “She doesn’t need a man to harness a horse. She can get to the soda fountain, to the church, her friend’s house, or any damn where she wants to go. It’s a real cultural moment.”

Of course individuals do arise and stand out, such as the early intellects and architects who helped build UA and the Alabama Insane Hospital, which became Bryce Hospital; from plantation owner and politician Robert Jemison Jr., to freed-slave bridgebuilder Horace King; from Pulitzer-winning Tuscaloosa News editor-publisher Buford Boone to Henry Wirz, who operated the POW camp here before going on to infamy, and ultimately hanging for war crimes, as the infamous “butcher of Andersonville.” Shandy Jones, Autherine Lucy, The Rev. T.Y. Rogers Jr., John H. England Jr. and others figure prominently in the city’s fight toward equal rights for all.

“He talks quite frankly about the racial horrors of Tuscaloosa, basically from 1820 to 1970,” Noble said. “Before the Civil War, through, and during, this was not a progressive place.

“It’s not a negative book; that’s not the intent. But he doesn’t have much nice to say about leadership in Tuscaloosa, until you get well up, pretty close to the present.”

“All of these things come on in rapid succession, and they create a revolution in everyday life,” Hubbs said. “People no longer have to go out to the privy; kitchens come indoors. Bicycles gave freedom.”

What made Tuscaloosa different was that the turnaround happened in a “very short span, three score and 10, just about 70 years exactly,” from 1869 to 1939, transforming from dusty, nothing town to modern city, Hubbs said.

“In 1869, the newspaper editors all said, ‘Listen, this town is really worn out, and it’s old.’ Mind you, it was exactly 50 years old,” Hubbs said, laughing. “So they got started late, but began playing catch-up.”

The interstate system helped, as did improved river traffic; the university of course became “the tale that wags the dog.” But even with things like the smokestack recruitment, that ultimately faltered, rippled out to bring in first the JVC plant, which itself went under, but helped pave the way for another international investor in Mercedes-Benz.

“The way I see it, I think it’s a lot of small things adding up, over a long period of time,” Hubbs said.

Naturally enough, the book concludes with April 27, 2011′s minutes of horror, followed by months, years even, of heroism.

The aftermath rebuilt the community in more ways than the literal, it’s suggested.

“He doesn’t do this explicitly,” Noble said, but “the Tuscaloosa of the tornado, in a kind of mega-ethical way, helps to redeem the Tuscaloosa of bad racial behavior, the lynchings and beatings, every kind of horror, all through the 20th century.”

Of course good people do good things, Hubbs said, but this went beyond.

“People made these instantaneous decisions to dig in and help each other,” Hubbs said, and then tens of thousands from all over the world came, and kept coming, to help Tuscaloosa rebuild.

“Well, why did they come, and why did they keep coming? I think there are several answers. People saw that Tuscaloosa was worth fixing up. Tuscaloosans had created something over the years; they had a story, and this was just part of that continuing story.

“People saw themselves as part of something bigger than themselves.”

“Here’s the worst that can happen, and we’re going to keep going,” Hubbs said. “We’re going to rise above.”

An event to celebrate the book will be held 5:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday Nov. 21, in the downtown federal building, featuring Noble interviewing Hubbs. It was rescheduled from a previous date, which was postponed by commemorations for the death of Tuscaloosa Police Investigator Dornell Cousette.

“Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making” is available from UA Press, Ernest & Hadley Booksellers and Barnes and Noble, for $24.95. It’s in glossy paperback, with 162 color and colorized images, and six maps, over 206 pages, designed by Robin McDonald. For more, see www.uapress.ua.edu, or www.tuscaloosa200.com.

Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com or 722-0201.