Privation and Pride: Life in Blockaded Alabama. A Heritage in Clay: The Lineage of Robert Ussery. Ground Zero in the Fire Ant Wars. Places in Peril 2006: Alabama's Endangered Historic Landmarks. Read
article excerpts below.
Privation
and Pride: Life in Blockaded Alabama
By
Jessica Fordham Kidd
When President
Lincoln issued his blockade proclamation in April 1861, the Union
navy had a thirty-five-hundred-mile shoreline to blockade. Although
many Confederate blockade runners were able to break through the
Union patrols, the blockade caused shortages of many everyday necessities.
Clothing, food, and household supplies became very expensive and
scarce. The people of the blockaded South had to use inventiveness
and perseverance to survive. Parthenia Antoinette Hague's memoir, A
Blockaded Family: Life in Southern Alabama During the Civil War,
is a meticulous record of how Southerners adapted to the blockade
and invented substitutes for hard-to-find household goods. Hague
describes how the people in her community developed substitutes for
things like coffee, sugar, and baking soda. She details the efforts
of women to clothe and shoe their families and illustrates the methods
of conservation and recycling that helped people make the most of
what they had during the lean blockade years.
A
Heritage in Clay: The Lineage of Robert Ussery
By Joey
Brackner
Explore
the interwoven genealogies of Alabama's Southern folk pottery
tradition through the lineage of Robert Ussery, whose pottery
legacy has grown steadily with his family tree. For over two
centuries, descendants of Ussery have remained true to the
conventions of folk pottery while adapting the art to meet
the varying needs of consumers. From essentials of the home,
such as churns and chamber pots in the early 1800s, to present-day
face jugs and ornamental ware, the line of Ussery potters has
truly seen the full spectrum of the tradition realized.
Based on Joey Brackner's Alabama Folk Pottery (University of Alabama Press,
2006).
Ground
Zero in the Fire Ant Wars
By
Joshua Blu Buhs
The fire ant is an
icon of the South just like sweet tea and red dirt. However, the tiny
denizen, with its mounds growing cancerously out of lawns and gardens
from Texas to Virginia, was not always a local. Surprisingly, the insect
was not even heard of in Alabama until the 1930s, when it entered the
country through the port of Mobile, fleeing the flooded regions of
its native Argentina. Its flaming sting, swarming proliferation, and
perfect adaptability to adverse conditions quickly alarmed the State
Conservation Department, which launched an odyssey of extermination
that Joshua Buhs has dubbed "The Fire Ant Wars." Solutions, from pesticide
to imported natural enemies, have been attempted in vain, and the wily
foe, Solenopsis invicta, continues to thrive.
Places in Peril 2006: Alabama's
Endangered Historic Landmarks
By Melanie Betz Gregory and Ellen Mertins
This
annual collaboration between the Alabama Historical Commission and the
Alabama Preservation Alliance once again brings the state's threatened
landmarks to the forefront. This year's list includes historic homes
in Ashville, Talladega, Huntsville, Montgomery, and Anniston, along with
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century barns statewide. The "Victorianized" John
Ash House, one of the oldest buildings in St. Clair County, and the distinctive
Lewis Young "Red Roof" House in Dadeville found their way onto the Places
in Peril list this year. Fort Cusseta, the Old Judicial Building, the
Drish House, and Seymour Bluff Archeological Site also help round out
the list of endangered historic places for 2006.
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