Persons whose names are followed by as asterisk (*) were listed as “Movers & Shakers” in the Mobile Register, 1999.  Biographies are primarily from the same.

 Politics

• Frank Boykin*. Boykin was one of the most influential men in Mobile for more than three decades.
  • Primary Source: Press-Register series 12/01 Everything’s Made for Love: A Frank Boykin Retrospective by Sam Hodges.
  • Boykin’s family gave up sharecropping in Choctaw County when he was a small boy, moving in 1893 to southeast Washington County. His father, James, ran a store, and his mother, Glo, took in boarders.
  • His tales of his early business life, still told around Mobile and faithfully recorded in the 1973 biography of him that his family had published, merit skepticism.
  • Frank Boykin often spoke of how he dropped out of school at age 8 to carry water for a construction crew on the Alabama, Tennessee and Northern Railroad. He told people that at age 16 he went to Washington, D.C., where Alabama Sen. John Hollis Bankhead helped him get a huge contract to supply the Southern Railway with crossties. But books on early Alabama railroads show that the A,T&N didn’t form until after 1905, when Boykin was 20. And Bankhead, though a U.S. House member earlier, didn’t get to the Senate until 1907, when Boykin was 22.
  • John Everett, 20 years older and a Washington County “Cajan”, took Boykin on as partner around 1905. In the 1890s, Everett had been buying land and making money through timber, turpentine and oil and gas leases. Boykin almost never mentioned Everett but they were partners for 22 years in the firm was called “Everett and Boykin”. Everett and Boykin operated sawmills and commissaries, and had a real estate company in Chickasaw. They appear to have tried their hands at fruit orchards, tung oil, castor beans, cattle, hogs and real estate. They invested in local shipbuilding companies during World War I and later sold war surplus goods. They survived Boykin’s 1925 conviction (overturned on appeal) for violating Prohibition laws. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the two men were buying southwest Alabama land. Local oral history has it, they would let a landowner run up a bill at the commissary, then offer to settle the account by taking title to his property. Everett died unexpectedly in 1927. Boykin got himself appointed administrator of Everett’s estate. In 1939 Boykin bought out family members’ interest for $8,800. Boykin’s brother Matt was the probate judge who approved the deal.
  • After Everett’s death, Boykin took on other partners, most importantly T.J. Rester, a fellow timberman. Boykin also helped organize a number of other land-related companies. The list includes Bilbo Livestock and Land Co., Washington Lumber and Turpentine Co., Gulf Beach Land and Development Co., Lillian Realty Corp. and Gulf Properties Corp.
  • In 1930, Gulf Properties — led by Birmingham lawyer Forney Johnston — bought almost all of Dauphin Island for an unknown sum. Boykin had a 20 percent interest in the partnership. Boykin helped organize the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo. In 1953, Boykin and his Dauphin Island partners (Gulf Properties) sold out to the Mobile Chamber of Commerce for about $1 million.
  • Boykin was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1934 and re-elected thirteen times. A group of Mobile businessmen and officeholders drafted Boykin to replace McDuffie in Congress. He used the campaign slogan, “Everything’s made for love.”
  • In 1935 he won funds to build the Bankhead Tunnel beneath the Mobile River, which opened in 1941.
  • In 1941, he persuaded Congress and the Air Force to build Brookley Field Air Force Base.
  • He promoted the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and other legislation that benefited paper mills, in which he owned stock.
  • He aggressively pursued other local and special interests: A bridge to Dauphin Island, where he owned property. Raising the wartime cap on turpentine prices. Finding federal money to protect agriculture from fire ants and white-fringed beetles. Protecting peanut subsidies. Securing an oil-depletion allowance to spur oil production.
  • “There was a Captain (Willie) Oswalt of the Oswalt family, and they had a towing company,” Cane said. “Frank went by to see him and ask for his support. Captain Oswalt said, ‘Frank, I’ve been knowing you all my life. If we send you to Washington, you’re liable to steal the Capitol.’ Frank said, ‘That’s right, but if I steal it I’ll bring it back to Mobile.’”
  • Because of his floor votes (sporadic though they might have been), Boykin is properly understood as pro-business, anti-organized labor, an isolationist on foreign affairs, and a reliable foe (as were almost all his Southern colleagues) of legislation guaranteeing civil rights for black Americans.
  • In his office he had on display a wolf hide, five mounted deer heads, two six-shooters once owned by Jesse James, a German cuckoo clock, an egg from the extinct Great Auk, a 16th-century Italian chastity belt and a preserved whale penis.
  • In the early 1940s he acquired a large part of 92,000 acres owned by the United States Lumber and Cotton Co., a failed English land syndicate.
  • Boykin brought chemical companies to Washington County in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When a salt dome was discovered on his land in McIntosh, Boykin Boykin formed the Alabama Salt Corp. under his children’s names and had business associates, including son-in-law Riley Smith, to buy additional mineral rights in the area of the dome. He persuaded the Mathieson Chemical Co. to put in a plant nearby. The plant purchased salt from Boykin for the production of chlorine and caustic soda. Mathieson, Geigy Chemical Co. and Courtaulds Ltd. Followed, as well as for Alabama Power Co.’s nearby Barry Steam Plant built to service the new companies., allowing Boykin to claim credit for establishing a “chemical kingdom”.
  • In the late 1940s, Boykin befriended Alabama Gov. “Big Jim” Folsom, who enjoyed hunting on the Boykin property. Folsom had control over Fort Morgan. Boykin and Rester owned about 3,000 acres on the Fort Morgan Peninsula, and Boykin persuaded Folsom to give them a long-term, low-cost lease (under Rester’s name) to the fort itself and about 400 surrounding acres. Boykin and Rester opened a hotel and restaurant close to the fort and sold lots up and down the peninsula. The state helped by black-topping the main peninsula road and by building an airstrip nearby. Boykin’s role was applauded at first by Hatchett Chandler, the eccentric historian and caretaker of Fort Morgan. Later, Chandler turned on him, devoting one of his many published essays — “Little Gems” he called them — to “Old Greedy,” his name for the congressman. Ultimately, the hotel and restaurant lost money, and Boykin and Rester let the fort go back to the state.
  • It is thought that he knew that the state was going to change the planned route for a new Highway 90 from Mobile to Theodore and bought land where the road was going to go. In late 1948, newspaper clippings show, the state highway department abandoned plans to reroute Highway 90 south along the L&N Railroad tracks. Another Boykin friend and hunting mate, Ward McFarland, Folsom’s state highway director, announced the change in mid-December of that year. Rester was buying land there in early December, after the controversy over the route hit the newspapers, but before a final decision had been announced. By the early 1950s, Rester had sold acreage in the area to Skyland Development Corp., which created subdivisions in the area. Boykin son-in-law Riley Smith was an officer in Skyland. Exactly what Boykin knew and when can’t be said for sure.
  • Boykin, who befriended such oilmen as H.L. Hunt, leased mineral rights on about 150,000 acres, according to son Dick. Boykin got modest amounts for the leases and much more in royalties if there was actual oil and gas production.
  • He signed long-term timber leases on100,000 acres in the mid-1950s with St. Regis Paper Co. In a 1965 letter, Frank Boykin said the family was getting $150,000 a year from St. Regis, but he added that the figure was about to double.
  • Boykin eventually amassed more than 160,000 acres in Washington and Mobile counties as the Tensaw Land and Timber Co., making him the wealthiest man in Mobile. Through the later 1940s, he and T.J. Rester were selling lots from acreage they owned in south Mobile County, in the old Carol Plantation area. He had timber leases as far away as Mexico, and bought land in Maryland and Virginia. At his death in 1969, he owned about 120,000 acres, and mineral rights on more than that. His worth was estimated anywhere from $60 million to $200 million, and he had set his family up for much greater wealth through minerals and lucrative timber rights deals.
  • The Mobile Paper Co. asked the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for a $750,000 loan. To get it, said Papermaker Reuben  Hartman, he had to turn over 40% of the company’s stock, with a par value of $640,000, to children, brothers and friends of Congressman Boykin for $36,000. Boykin’s cousin, Frank Prince, who worked for the RFC. Prince was subsequently fired from the RFC. Stone Container Co., a Chicago-based paper manufacturer, stepped in and offered to buy Mobile Paper’s asset’s for $1.36 million.” Frank’s son Bob Boykin “would have a long career with Stone Container,” which kept him on to run the Mobile mill. Hartman’s family says the mill was stolen from them. Boykin also helped secure a $450,000 for Stutts Lumber Industries of Thomasville to which Boykin sells timber.
  • Defeated in 1962, he was convicted of racketeering the next year at age seventy-eight, and sentenced to the federal penitentiary. But Boykin still had friends in the Justice Department. Attorney General Robert Kennedy requested that President Lyndon B. Johnson grant a full pardon to Boykin, and it was done. He was fined $40,000 for influence peddling in a federal tax investigation. Boykin died a year later.
  • Boykin’s hunting lodge on 10,000 acres, with tracts on either side of Highway 43, just north of McIntosh remain in use by those heirs who wound up with them after bitter family litigation in the 1980s. Each year, a few days after Thanksgiving, they have a hunt attended by local and statewide elected officials. Gov. Don Siegelman, Lt. Gov. Steve Windom and Sen. Richard Shelby are among those who have come. Frank Boykin would invite leaders in government, the military and business.
  • In 2001 a group of local oystermen staged a protest by tonging for oysters in beds that the state has declared off-limits to the public. The oystermen say that the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is illegally allowing private property owners in the Heron Bay area to lease the rights to the oyster beds. Some of the oystermen say they have been arrested this year by state officials for harvesting oysters in the same beds.  The oystermen say that they are particularly bothered that one of the private landowners is Riley Boykin Smith, the state commissioner of conservation. Smith is president of Tensaw Land and Timber, and Victor Lott Jr., an attorney for the company, agreed that Tensaw has leased “a large number of areas for oyster reefs for a long time,” but he denied that Smith had done anything inappropriate. Riley Boykin Smith is president of the Alabama Wildlife Federation.
• Pat Lyons*. Lyons served on the City Council, then was elected mayor in 1904. He is credited with helping establish a municipal water system, reducing some taxes and paying off a large debt the city owed. He also planted the first azaleas in Bienville Square, a tradition that soon spread across the city. He also helped establish the Michael and Lyons Grocery Co., which became one of the largest in the South, and was a bank executive and owner of steamships.
• Jack Edwards*. Edwards served 20 years in the U.S. Congress, retiring in 1984. He was instrumental in establishing federal funding the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, the Theodore Ship Canal, and the Interstate 10 tunnel downtown. As a private citizen, he also worked to support the Mobile Convention Center, built on the waterfront, and for improving public education in Mobile County. He is semi-retired from law practice now.
  • “Jack Edwards said that I had made him rethink what he was doing in Washington on some issues and [that he didn't want to wonder] when his grandson got around to reading his public record, what he may think. Jack did try very hard to help MBAS and Tom Davis of Sunshine Canoes to place the Escatawpa River in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Designation“ – Myrt Jones
• Jeremiah Andrew Denton Jr., born in Mobile, is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and a former U.S. senator of the Republican party. He spent almost eight years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and later wrote a book about his experiences – When Hell Was in Session (which was made into a TV movie in 1979). Denton attended McGill Institute and Spring Hill College and graduated from the US Naval Academy. Denton is best known for the 1966 North Vietnamese television interview he gave, as a prisoner, in Hanoi. During the interview he blinked his eyes in morse code to spell out the word “torture” to communicate that his captors were torturing him. For his continuous resistance and leadership, even in the face of torture and inhumane conditions, he would be awarded the Navy Cross.
• Alfred L. Staples.* He was known as “Mr. Mardi Gras” because he was so involved in Mobile’s annual celebration and helped give it financial security. He was considered a leading businessman and banker for several decades and served in the state House of Representatives from 1935 to 1939. He was one of the few people to serve political interests in two states: In 1965, he was on the staff of Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson. Staples was the father of Emily Staples, who married William J. Hearin.
• John T. Cochrane Sr.* made his first impact on Alabama by constructing short-line railroads statewide, including the Alabama, Tennessee, & Northern, opening rural areas to commerce. He built banks and served as president of the Mobile City and County School Board, where he was instrumental in building Murphy High School. He also founded the state’s first oil refinery, built on Blakeley Island. In 1925, as president of the Chamber of Commerce, he organized the effort to erect the bridge that was ultimately named after him, the Cochrane-Africatown Bridge. He was instrumental in building the Mobile Bay Causeway in 1927. Cochrane remained at the helm of the AT&N until his death in 1938.  At that point his son, John Jr., assumed the position and held it until 1946.  He disposed of his holdings in the line to a syndicate of investors. Cochrane lived at 1028 Government Street on the northwest corner of Government and Espejo streets, where an AmSouth Bank now stands.
• Joe Langan*. Langan was state representative from 1939 to 1947, state senator until 1953, then city commissioner and then mayor until 1969. Langan is credited with expanding the city limits. He also built fire stations and Municipal Park (now named for him) and the Mobile Museum of Art. He also helped change a city spoils system to a merit system that reduced corruption. Langan worked behind the scenes to promote racial equality. His work led to the hiring of the first black policemen and firemen, and he encouraged banks and other businesses to hire more blacks. While some racist whites criticized him as doing too much to promote integration, some blacks complained he did too little. In 1969, he was caught in the middle and was voted out of office.
• Wiley Bolden*. In 1944 Bolden helped form the Voters League, which registered blacks to vote and involved people in politics. He and John LeFlore organized the local branch of the NAACP, and fought for years for civil rights advancements for blacks. But he is perhaps best remembered for being the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that forced the City of Mobile to change its form of government. Because of Bolden and others, Mobile now has seven council members, elected from districts that ensure at least three black members. Until 1985, three commissioners were elected at-large, virtually guaranteeing a black member would never have been elected. Bolden died in 1987 at the age of 94.
• John LeFlore*. He was Mobile’s foremost civil rights leader for more than three decades. His was the voice of nonviolence and quiet moderation, and working with Mayor Joe Langan, helped achieve many integration gains without demonstrations and violence. He was executive secretary of the local NAACP for 38 years, and kept working toward goals even after shots were fired at his house in 1965 and his home was burned in 1967. In the 1930s and `40s, he was credited with helping to open Pullman dining car service to blacks, and helped open employment opportunities for blacks in the U.S. Postal Service in this area. He was instrumental in filing the Birdie Mae Davis lawsuit in 1963 that forced the integration of Mobile County Schools, as well as the Bolden et al vs. City of Mobile suit that forced a change in Mobile’s form of government that was more democratic and representative of the city’s population. He died in 1976.
• Michael W. Figures*. In 1972, Figures was one of the first four blacks to graduate from the University of Alabama School of Law. Three years later, he was one of the lawyers who filed the landmark lawsuit that forced Mobile to change its government from three commissioners elected at large to members elected from districts. Five of the seven members must approve anything before it can pass, and this insures that at least one black member has a say-so in everything. In 1978, he became the first black state senator from Mobile County, and was later elected the Senate’s first black pro-tempore, second-in-command. In the Legislature, he worked for education reform. In the 1980s, he helped the family of a black teen-ager who was lynched by two Ku Klux Klansmen win a $7 million judgment that mortally wounded what was left of the Klan. In 1988, he was arrested with 23 other black legislators in an effort to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds. In 1996, Figures, at the height of his power in the Senate, suffered a brain aneurysm and died at the age of 49. His wife, Vivian Figures, was elected to succeed him.
• Vernon Crawford (1919-86) founded Mobile’s first African-American law firm in 1956. He also founded Gulf Federal Saving and Loan. Crawford worked on many important civil right’s cases, including L. B. Sullivan v. New York Times, Bolden v. City of Mobile, and Birdie Mae Davis, et. al. v. Mobile County School Board.
• Arthur Outlaw*. Outlaw’s father, George, was one of the founding fathers of Morrison’s Cafeteria in 1920. Outlaw joined the Morrison organization, eventually becoming secretary-treasurer and vice-chairman of the board. Outlaw was elected Mobile’s mayor in 1985. As mayor until 1989, Outlaw is credited with initiating the Convention Center, laying the groundwork for downtown rejuvenation, boosting tourism, hiring more police officers and attracting new industry to the city. 
  • George Cabell Outlaw, Sr., an attorney, advanced J. A. Morrison $800. In 1928, serving as secretary-treasurer, Outlaw orchestrated the sale of public stock brought outside capital into the enterprise and enabled Morrison’s Cafeteria to continue to grow. During the 1940s, he continued serving as secretary-treasurer after Morrison retired. In 1952, Outlaw was instrumental in the formation of Morrison Food Services, a division which today is contracted to serve more than 300 institutions. For a number of years Outlaw served as president of the Mobile Chamber of Commerce.
• Mike Dow was Mayor of Mobile from 1989 to 2005. He served three-tours in Vietnam as a helicopter door gunner. He joined his brother-in-law Jim Busby’s laser printer company QMS in 1977.  QMS was eventually taken public. Dow left QMS to run for mayor in 1988, when he won over Arthur Outlaw. Among Dow’s accomplishments as mayor is the downtown “String of Pearls” initiative. After deciding not to run for reelection in 2005, Dow joined Jim Busby’s new company CentraLite as Executive Vice-President of Sales and Marketing.
• Mary Zoghby* served in the Alabama House from 1978 to 1994 and was considered one of the most influential people in the Legislature. She was chairwoman of the House Banking Committee and she successfully guided legislation that changed Mobile’s form of government to a more democratic one, made historic preservation easier through tax-free bonding authority, allowed women to obtain court orders forcing their abusers out of the house, and other measures. After failing to win re-election in 1994, Mrs. Zoghby stepped right in as resource director for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Mobile, where she works to find funding to keep youth active and off the streets. In 1996, she was honored as Mobilian of the Year.
• Ann Smith Bedsole is a native of Selma and grew up in Jackson, AL. Mrs. Bedsole is the owner and operator of Bedsole Farms and President and Chairman of the Board of White Smith Land Co. She also chairs the distribution committee of the Sybil H. Smith Charitable Trust. In 1978 Ann Bedsole became the first Republican woman ever to be elected to the Alabama House of Representatives and subsequently Alabama State Senator. Bedsole credits her father, the late lumberman M. White Smith for her interest in politics as a youngster. White Smith owned a sawmill and timberland in the county and was an early Alabama Republican.
• Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1835–1909), born in Mobile, served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.
• Alexis Herman served as the Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. The daughter of politician Alex Herman and Gloria Caponis, a school teacher, Alexis grew up in Mobile and earned her high school diploma from the Heart of Mary High School. She briefly attended Spring Hill College, and graduated from Xavier University. Herman serves on the boards of several major companies, including Coca Cola, Toyota, Cummins, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and Prudential.
• William H. (Bill) Pryor was born in Mobile and attended McGill-Toolen Catholic High School. From 1997 to 2004, he served as Alabama attorney general. Pryor received national attention in 2003 when he called for the removal of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore; he said although he agreed with the propriety of displaying the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, he was bound to follow the court order and uphold the rule of law. Pryor was nominated to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals by President George W. Bush in 2003 and, after his nomination stalled in the Senate due to Democratic opposition, he was installed as judge via recess appointment in 2004.  He was confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit and sworn in to the lifetime judicial position in 2005. Pryor’s father, Holcombe, is a Roman Catholic deacon who teaches at McGill-Toolen.

Business

Maritime

• John P. Waterman*. Waterman came to Mobile in 1902 as a manager for a British steamship line. In 1919, he joined in organizing a steamship line that became the Waterman Steamship Corp. By World War II, the company owned more than 125 ships. As the late newspaperman John Will put it, “From that date until his death in Mobile in 1937, Mr. Waterman’s heart was set on the development of Mobile as a major port in its own right.” Waterman led the fight for more deepwater facilities to expand Mobile’s seagoing possibilities. He also fought for the development of interior waterways coming to Mobile, and worked to equalize Mobile’s rates for railroad and barge line service. – PR 6/7/06
• Ed Roberts*, also known as E.A. Roberts, was chairman of the Waterman Steamship Corp. Beginning as a cargo clerk, Roberts won promotions that led to becoming president of the company in 1936. During World War II, Roberts headed the largest privately owned steamship line in the nation, operating a fleet of 125 ships. Roberts personally served as an advisor to the director general of the War Shipping Administration, a position for which he was awarded a Certificate of Merit from President Harry Truman.
  • He was chairman of the city’s first planning commission from 1944-1950, which produced a master plan for the city’s growth, a new police headquarters, expanded sanitary sewer service, and laid the groundwork for Ladd Stadium. Roberts also started a youth sports program, worked to expand the State Docks, and raised money for a new UMS-Wright campus on Mobile Street.
  • He started Southern Industries, which capitalized and managed fledgling businesses in the city and grew from $1.9 million in total assets in 1946 to more than $28 million in 1964.
  • He also purchased and restored the Grand Hotel, and spurred the construction of the Waterman Building in downtown Mobile.
• Malcom McLean bought Waterman Steamship in 1955 He is known as the “father of containerization.” – New Zealand Shipping and Marine Society, PR 9/19/99
  • He was born in 1913 in North Carolina. He worked as a trucker and at the age of 21 he began the McLean Trucking Co. which, by his 40th birthday, he had made into the second biggest road haulage operation in the US.
  • McLean conceived the idea of using ships to carry demountable truck bodies from semi-trailers on board ship. It is said that in 1937, while waiting for long hours in his truck cab for his cargo of cotton to be loaded aboard a ship in Hoboken, he asked himself why the whole truck could not be loaded at once. Moreover, his developing vision embraced rather more than mere cargo handling, extending to a concept of coordinating both sea and land transport around these portable units.
  • In 1955, after selling his trucking company, he bought Pan Atlantic Steamship and its small fleet of war-built T-2 tankers from Waterman. The tankers, with minimum modifications, were converted for the carriage of van bodies. Four months later in 1955, McLean bought Waterman Steamship. Six of the Waterman vessels were converted at the Mobile Ship Repair Co to carry 226 35-ft. vans, and in 1957 the first of these ships, the Gateway City, entered service. McLean borrowed $57 million to buy Mobile-based Waterman and the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Co.
  • In 1959 Pan-Atlantic became Sea-Land Service, still predominantly a Gulf and east coast operation. Sea-Land established a reputation for the conversion of tankers, cargoships and other military surplus vessels. Waterman continued operating under that name while Pan-Atlantic became Sea-Land Service Inc.
  • In 1969, McLean sold both companies to R.J. Reynolds Industries for $157 million worth of RJR stock. He also took a seat on the Reynolds board of directors. McLean turned his attention to real estate, life assurance and farming; he bought a gigantic peat harvesting operation and developed modular housing and applied his expertise in materials handling to the development of a device that would help transfer patients from hospital beds to stretchers. In 1977, McLean resigned his Reynolds board post to buy a shipping competitor, U.S. Lines, for $111 million.
  • Ironically Mobile did not take advantage of containerization, although Waterman was headquartered there and McLean lived there.
  • In 1955 McLean bought an estate in Point Clear which he used as a summer residence while residing much of the year in New York City. He was a majority stockholder in Mobile-based Loyal American Insurance Co. and in Diamondhead Corp., which developed Lake Forest in Daphne and other real estate ventures in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. McLean died in 2001. In 2007 the McLean family donated $1 million to the Mobile Maritime Museum. 
  • Despite McLean’s connection to South Alabama, containerization did not become a major factor in the Port of Mobile because of its emphasis on bulk cargo and forest products.
• Angus R. Cooper*. Angus R. Cooper started in the stevedoring business on the Mobile docks in 1905. Today, its descendant corporation is known as Cooper/T. Smith Stevedoring Inc., located on Royal Street.  Cooper/T. Smith now has operations in thirty-eight US ports, and has foreign operations in Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Canada and Mexico.
  • The Coopers were drawn to the waterfront by producing resin for naval stores from their Baldwin County pine plantations. In 1925, Angus Cooper and his family moved to New Orleans where he would expand his stevedoring business and manage the Munson Line’s gulf-wide operations. The Munson Line prospered so well that Munson built one of the first true skyscrapers in New York City; however, Munson hit hard times in 1929. Angus Cooper continued handling stevedoring for one of Munson’s allies, Alcoa Steamship Company, and as a result the Munson Line surrendered all of their equipment in lieu of pay.
  • Angus Cooper’s son, Ervin S. Cooper, joined his family’s business and had two sons (Angus II and David). He directed the firm’s expansion to ports throughout the U.S. Today, at the foot of Government Street, Cooper Riverside Park honors him. Angus Cooper II is a member of the board of trustees for the University of Alabama system, and serves on an array of boards across the Gulf Coast and in Mobile, including UMS-Wright Preparatory School, Kaiser International Corp., Whitney National Bank and the D-Day Museum in New Orleans.
• E.B. Peebles Jr.* Peebles served on the Senior Bowl for more than 20 years, but it was in 1985-86 that he is credited with turning things around, finding new sponsors, launcing a major advertising campaign and boosting attendance tremendously. He had done the same for America’s Junior Miss in 1964 when the organization was struggling for sponsorship. He was CEO of Ryan-Walsh Inc. stevedoring. When Ladd Stadium was renovated in 1997, it was renamed Ladd-Peebles Memorial Stadium.

Banking

• Ernest F. Ladd Sr.* Ladd was president of the Chamber of Commerce and organizer and president of Merchants Bank. Ladd had helped organize the bank in 1901 after leaving the banking firm of William H. Leinkauf and Son, where he had started out as a messenger. Ladd married Lillie Radcliffe in 1911. In 1912, Ladd had C.L. Hutchisson design a spacious residence at 1613 Government Street. He became president of Merchants Bank in 1915. Mr. Ladd died suddenly at his summer home on Mobile Bay in 1941. Ladd Stadium was built shortly afterward and named for him. The former Ladd home went through several owners before being destroyed in a devastating fire in the early seventies.
• John Finley McRae was chairman of the board of Merchants National Bank. Beginning as a runner and stenographer with Merchants Bank of Mobile, he was promoted, and eventually organized a foreign department, which was for many years the only foreign department in a bank between New Orleans and Baltimore. By 1929, Merchants Bank of Mobile had become Merchants National Bank, and McRae had become its vice-president. McRae continued to earn promotions and was named president in 1941. He supplemented bank employees’ military salaries during World War II so they could maintain their income. McRae served as director on numerous business boards; served as trustee for the United Fund of Mobile; was a founding director of the Southern Research Institute; and served on the board of trustees of Mobile Infirmary.
• Non Quincy “N.Q.” Adams, was a former Mobile County school board member and director, president, and chief executive of First National Bank in the 1970s and 1980s. After the bank merged with AmSouth Bank, he became chairman of AmSouth’s Southern region. He was also chairman of the local Red Cross chapter and director of the Mobile Community Foundation, director of the Mobile Area Council of Boy Scouts, trustee of the YMCA, director of the Exploreum, chairman of the Keep Mobile Beautiful Commission, a director of both the Industrial Development Board of the City of Mobile and the Business Council of Alabama., a director of the Loyal American Life Insurance Co., chairman and chief executive officer of the Modern Banking Association of Alabama, 1990 Mobilian of the Year. Adams was proud of his involvement with tree preservation and the beautification and revitalization of Bienville Square during the mid-1980s, according to his son. – PR 10/11/07
• Dwain Gregory Luce’s experiences were featured in Ken Burns’ documentary “The War.”, He was a senior vice president and a director of American National Bank. Retiring in 1961, he joined the First National Bank of Mobile, becoming executive vice president. He retired as president of First Bancgroup-Alabama and as vice chairman of the board of directors of the First National Bank of Mobile in 1982. – PR 12/20/07

Construction

• Dave Patton*. Patton was one of the first black Mobilians to make a fortune and have a real impact on the city. He started by doing hauling and demolition work at better prices than other contractors, but quickly earned a reputation for excellent work. He branched out into real estate and made a great deal of money. He donated land for public buildings and parks in predominantly black north Mobile. His company demolished the old buildings and dug the foundation for the Saenger Theater downtown. His mansion still stands at 1252 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. He died in 1927 at age 47.

Food

• Ollie H.* And Alfred F. Delchamps. In 1921, the Delchamps established a small grocery store in Mobile that by the 1970s had grown to a chain, Delchamps Food Stores, which had more than 90 stores. O.H. supported the Salvation Army and developed the idea for Forward Mobile in 1983. O.H. Delchamps Sr. died in 1987 at age 87.
• Walter Bellingrath*. In 1903, Bellingrath along with his brother, William, purchased the Montgomery Coca-Cola franchise. Soon they were able to pay off their debt and purchase the Mobile franchise, which Walter managed. Bellingrath’s business interests stretched to owning the National Mosaic Tile Company, serving on the board of the First National Bank, owning a warehousing company and he was an orignal founder of Waterman Steamship Company. He invested much of his time and money into creating the magnificent Bellingrath Gardens on Fowl River. He was a great philanthropist to the city. He had a long association with the Mobile Chamber of Commerce.  On two different occasions it was Walter Bellingrath who wrote a personal check to cover that entity’s annual financial shortfalls.  He died in 1955.
• H. Taylor Morrissette was chairman and chief executive officer of Colonial Sugars from 1980 until the company’s acquisition in 1986 by Savannah Foods and Industries. When Morrissette finished his military service, he went to work for Henderson Sugar Refinery as a route salesman. In 1963, he was elected assistant vice president of the company and in 1964 took the office of vice president in charge of sales. Three years later, he became vice president of Southern Industries Corporation, serving only one year before being elected a director of Godchaux-Henderson Sugar Company. He became president of that company in 1969. In 1973, Morrissette resigned his presidency of Godchaux-Henderson to accept the presidency of North American Sugar Industries, a division of Borden. In 1980, he acquired the assets of North American from Borden, and went on to form a new corporation known as Colonial Sugars, leading it at one point to annual sales of more than $300 million.

Retail

• C.J. Gayfer born in Southwold, England, in 1847, set out to find his fortune at age 17, making his way first to Canada, and then to the United States. He arrived in Mobile sometime after the Civil War, accounts in the Mobile Register indicate. He established a new retail store on North Joachim Street in 1879. Gayfers eventually became known as the largest department store in the downtown area. At the time of C.J. Gayfer’s death in 1915, his store had 150 employees, and did about a half million dollars annually in trade.

Real Estate

• Jay Pollack Altmayer*. Known as “J.P.,” Altmayer was the developer who built Bel Air Mall and helped revive downtown Mobile in the 1970s by redeveloping two blocks near Government and Royal streets with new office buildings and a parking garage. At one time he was one of the largest landowners in the county. Altmayer’s generosity extended to the donation of 200 acres for the establishment of Mobile College, now known as the University of Mobile, in the early 1960s. His wife, Nan H. Altmayer, said few people knew that when he was on the board at Mobile Infirmary, her husband fought to allow black patients to use the bathrooms on the floors where they had rooms. He was on the boards of First National Bank, Spring Hill College, Mobile Infirmary, the White House Fine Arts Committee, and the Spring Hill Avenue Temple. He died in 1999.
  • “We had worked very hard to place the Escatawpa River in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Designation, thinking we had everyone’s support, but at a major public hearing one of the largest land holders, J. P. Altmayer, had quietly gotten Scott and IP [International Paper] to vote against this and we lost. Altmayer (whom I had never met) was sitting behind me and was very proud of the fact that he had stopped us.” – Myrt Jones
• The Mitchell family: Brothers Abraham and Mayer, and Mayers’ wife Arlene, have given more than $36.6 million to USA, including a $22 million donation to the Mobile university’s new cancer research institute, subsequently named the Mitchell Cancer Institute, and $1 million to help complete the USA arena, now called the Mitchell Center. Although born in New Orleans, the Mitchells grew up in Mobile.
  • The Mitchells co-founded The Mitchell Company in the 1950s with Bill Lubel. The real estate company grew into one of the largest in the Southeast, and the brothers sold it for $25 million in 1986 to First Southern Federal Savings and Loan Association. They are now co-owners of Mitchell Brothers, Inc., which focuses on investments and philanthropic support. Mayer Mitchell died in 2007.
  • He was president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “In an article written on July 4, 2005, in The New Yorker magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg reports that Mayer “Bubba” Mitchell (as he is referred to in the article) is a member of “the Gang of Four” – former presidents of the AIPAC… In 2002, the present Congressman of the Seventh Congressional District of Alabama, democrat Arthur Davis defeated the incumbent Earl Hillard. Hillard held very strong anti-Israel views and even went as far as making a trip to Libya, an enemy of Israel with ties to terrorism, in 1997… According to Goldberg’s article, Mitchell was very instrumental in Davis’ campaign to defeat Hillard.” – Jeff Poor, “Who is Mayer Mitchell”, The Vanguard, 8/16/06; PR 9/29/07
  • Mayer Mitchell died in 2007. Mayer earned his B.S.  in economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance. He served as an Army first lieutenant in the Korean War earning a commendation ribbon with medal pendant for meritorious service. Mayer was Chair Pro Tempore Emeritus of the University of South Alabama’s Board of Trustees, and had been a member of that board since 1975. He received numerous civic awards and honors, including  the Alabama Business Hall of Fame. His 2004 memoir is “Just Call Me Bubba,” the title inspired by his nickname. – PR 9/27/07
  • After Mayer’s diagnosis with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 36, he sought experimental cancer treatments in Rochester, N.Y. Mitchell vowed to make sure Mobile had its own cancer center in the future. – PR 9/27/07
  • Mobile Bay Times Reminisences of Mayer Mitchell

Other (Diverse) Business

• Joseph L. Bedsole moved to Mobile from Thomasville, Ala. in 1919 when he purchased Van Antwerp’s wholesale drug operation. He organized Bedsole-Colvin Drug Company, S. B. Adams Lumber Company, Bedsole Investment Company, Bedsole Surgical Supply Company, and Mobile Fixture and Equipment Company. He was director of the First National Bank of Mobile for over 50 years. Mr. Bedsole served as the first chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Mobile. While serving as chairman of the Mobile Chamber of Commerce in 1926, Mr. Bedsole was responsible for organizing the first Mobile Community Chest, which later evolved into the United Way of southwest Alabama. During the Depression, Bedsole was called to serve on a committee to assist the city of Mobile in recovering from $1.5 million in indebtedness on its municipal bonds. Bedsole served as director Alabama Power Company. In his lifetime, he contributed more than $1.5 million for the improvement of the state. He also acted as chairman of the campaign to raise the original $2 million to build the new Mobile Infirmary on the present campus. His lifelong emphasis on education and economic development led to the formation of The J. L. Bedsole Foundation in 1949.
• Massey Palmer Bedsole - 6 feet, 6 inches tall-was a native of Mobile but he and his wife both had Clarke County roots. Bedsole was a nephew of J. L. Bedsole, the founder of the old Bedsole Department Store chain and of a wholesale pharmaceutical business and surgical supply business, Bedsole Surgical. Bedsole sold Bedsole Surgical in 1998 to the Caligor division of Henry Schein.. Palmer Bedsole lost his father at a young age and J. L. Bedsole’s son was killed in World War II and the two were more like father and son than uncle and nephew. Palmer Bedsole was the longtime chairman of the J. L. Bedsole Foundation, which has benefited projects throughout southwest Alabama. Palmer Bedsole was a benefactor of the Centre for the Living Arts, a nonprofit Mobile organization that operates Space 301, an art gallery, and the Saenger Theatre.
  • The owners of Bedsole Land Company agreed in 2005 to dissolve the 35-year-old family-owned company and divide the property, over 16,000 acres, rather than take a dispute over its management and operation to trial. The plaintiffs in the case—J. Russell Goodloe Jr., James G. Bedsole III, James L. Goodloe, Mary Ann Bedsole, T. Massey Bedsole, Travis B. Goodloe and Mary Ellis Gazaway—will receive 58.7 percent of the value of the property and defendant Palmer Bedsole will receive 41.3. The plaintiffs in the case had accused the company president, Palmer Bedsole, J. L. Bedsole’s nephew, of using his position to control the company. Bedsole countered that the plaintiffs owned a majority of the corporation and therefore always retained effective control. – PR
• Robert Herndon Radcliff, Jr. was instrumental in the development of Mobile into a modern port city. In 1941 after his father’s death, with the help of his uncle, he secured The Radcliff Gravel Company, which his father had helped form in 1917. In 1946, Radcliff Gravel Company became one of the four companies which merged to form Southern Industries, the first holding company or conglomerate in Mobile. Southern Industries became one of the largest corporations in Mobile. Radcliff was made a director of Southern Industries, became president and CEO in 1964 after the founder Ed Roberts died. After a short venture with a dredging company, Radcliff organized Radcliff Marine Services Company. The new company obtained a five-year contract to tow oil. From this venture stemmed Tenn Tom Towing Company, Midstream Fuel Service and Pepco, a land side wholesale and retail fuel supplier. Radcliff served as president and CEO of these companies until his retirement in 1984. He remained as chairman of the board and director until 1987. That same year, he joined with his son Greer in forming Radcliff Marine and Fuel Company and left its operation to his son.
• J. Gary Cooper and his wife, Beverly, are prominent members of Mobile’s business and civic communities. A retired Marine general, the 70-year-old Cooper became in 2002 the first black member of the Country Club of Mobile and serves today on the Alabama State Port Authority and Mobile County Industrial Development Authority. He is former U.S. ambassador to Jamaica and founder of Mobile’s Commonwealth National Bank. Cooper serves on the boards of Commonwealth National Bank and U.S. Steel Corp. Cooper resigned his post on the University of South Alabama’s fundraising team in 2007 after criticizing the school’s record on recruiting minority students. – PR 9/13/07
• Sven-Peter Mannsfeld: President of Degussa Alabama. Congressional Remarks by Rep. Sonny Callahan, 2000 – Part 1  Part 2

Technology

• Jim Busby is the founder of technology companies QMS and Centralite Systems (the former with brother-in-law Mike Dow).  The “Busby Mansion” on Cottage Hill Road is being developed into Snowden Place.

Timber

• A.C. (Albert Cary) Danner and the A.C. Danner Land and Lumber Company bought 800,000 acres of timberland from the Mobile & Ohio Railroad in 1883. Danner was at the time the President of the Bank of Mobile, and he presided over the failure of both the Bank of Mobile and his lumber company in 1884. He later was president of the Mobile Coal Company. Danner reportedly owned the first telephone in Mobile.
• Ben May. At the age of 15, May worked in a saw mill where he learned about the enterprise in which he would make his fortune. After one year of formal higher education at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he moved to Mobile. May quickly recognized the value of timber property and began acquiring cut-over lands with the idea of reforesting them. May’s fortune was made during World War I as he supplied England with much needed timber for the war effort. May took the money he made from this venture and invested it in land in southwest Alabama, Florida and California. He founded and became president of the Gulf Lumber Company in Mobile in 1940 and served as vice-president of Blackwell Nurseries. He also served as director of the First National Bank of Mobile and Morrison’s Cafeteria. May supported the Weizmann Institute; Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin; Dr. Paul Dudley White, renowned cardiologist; and Dr. Charles B. Huggins, director of cancer research at the University of Chicago. May was also instrumental in establishing the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham. He funded the Kettering-Meyer Laboratory of the Southern Research Institute in 1946. May also founded the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Chicago in 1951. May died in 1972. He left his fortune to the Ben May Charitable Trust, an endowment that was worth $12.4 million at the end of 2005. The trust supports the memorial fund, which is administered by the Community Foundation of South Alabama. Mobile’s main public library, the Ben May Public Library, is named in his honor.
• Ben C. Stimpson began his lumbering career as a teenager, working for his father’s lumber company in South Alabama. His father decided in 1941 to form a new company called Southern Logging Company with Ben and his two brothers, Billy and Gordon, as its owners. In 1952, Ben May, a friend of Stimpson’s father, was looking for new management for his lumber concentration yard, Gulf Lumber Company, and he found it in the Stimpson brothers. In 1973, following May’s death, the brothers acquired ownership of the company, and in 1992 turned the reins over to the third generation of Stimpsons.
• James Geely McGowin. Early in life, McGowin began assisting his father in cutting timber. McGowin opened a mercantile business in Brewton in 1892. In 1903, McGowin sold his interest in the mercantile store and moved to Mobile to join his brothers in the lumber exporting business. Two years later, McGowin joined with his brothers and a brother-in-law in purchasing the W.T. Smith Lumber Company in Chapman, Alabama. The early period of McGowin’s management of the company was one of intense competition. “Cut out and get out” was a dominant philosophy, but McGowin stayed with the land, purchasing and merging with neighboring mills. In 1925, McGowin became president of the company, a position he held the rest of his life. Many southern timber industries began to suffer as old timber began to run out, and reforestation had not yet produced new timber. Diversification and the use of all possible timber were the ways McGowin met the problem. McGowin’s main avocations were his farm south of Chapman and the development of a wildlife conservation area
• Earl M. McGowin. A Brewton native and son of James McGowin, graduated from the University of Alabama and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. Upon his arrival home from England, he went to work at W.T. Smith Lumber Company. He and his brothers, as operators of one of the largest lumber companies in the south, were front-runners in putting into practice the concept of sustained yield. He formed the Alabama Forest Products Association and in 1941, he was elected president of the Southern Pine Association. After the family sold W.T. Smith Lumber in 1966, McGowin remained in the lumber business, becoming increasingly active in the fight for improved lumber standards and quality control with the Southern Pine Inspection Bureau, of which he had been chairman of the board since 1960. McGowin began his political career in 1930, as an elected member of the Alabama House of Representatives. In 1950, he was appointed director of the Department of Conservation.
• Hooper Matthews Jr. was a well-known businessman in Atmore. He managed family timberlands as a registered forester and owned the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co. of Atmore and South Alabama Vending Co. He began the Weeks Bay Mitigation Bank, now controlled by his family.
• Stallworth Pine Products Co produced and exported turpentine and rosin to South Africa, Europe and Australia.

Baldwin Citizens

• Josiah Blakeley emigrated from Connecticut in 1814, and founded the town of Blakeley on the Tensaw River. He also owned Blakeley Island. He was also Mobile’s first justice of the peace in 1814.
• Nicholas Cook II was a licensed Bay Pilot and a Justice of the Peace in 1817-1819. He held extensive land grants at Weeks Bay and Bon Secour areas and founded the hamlet of Bon Secour.
• William H. Roberts came to Mobile by wagon train in 1835 when he was 18 years old. Eventually he became a partner in the Cotton brokerage firm of Ross and Roberts. He married Sarah Bull and they had six children. After Sarah died he moved to Swift in Baldwin County with his daughter Susan, where he married a teacher, Ann Byard, and had 2 more children. Mr. Roberts worked as a bookkeeper for his son-in-law, Charles Swift and was also Postmaster and a Notary Public. His daughter Miriam built Swift Presbyterian Church in 1910 with land and lumbar donated by Charles Swift. One grandson, architect Platt Roberts, designed a number of public buildings, homes and churches in Mobile, among them the Waterman Building and Platt’s brother Ed Roberts was president of Waterman Steamship Company.
• Charles Swift came to the Mobile-Baldwin County region with his brother Ira and worked for a time with George W. Robinson of the Southern States Lumber Company. Charles married Susan Roberts and they had 13 children, including George (State and U.S. Senator), Ira (4-Star General, U.S. Army), and Edward Gavin (owner of Swift’s Cottages on Bon Secour River). Charles and Susan settled on Wolf Creek at “Swift, Alabama” in the Miflin area. Charles and Susan moved the mill to Bon Secour and built a home there about 1900 referred to as “The Big House”. Charles Swift and Mark Lyons of Mobile built an export sawmill, first called Swift and Lyons, then Swift & Son. Charles kept an office in Mobile and had a fleet of boats and barges to transport the lumber from Bon Secour to Mobile, and from there it was shipped to South America. Charles Swift died in 1912 and his oldest son, Robin, moved the mill to Atmore. It has evolved into two companies: The Swift Lumber Company and Swift Supply, Inc. The latter operates the truss manufacturing business and their chain of building center stores. Swift School in Bon Secour was built for the children of Charles and Susan and the mill worker’s children. Charles’ widow, Susan, in later years was instrumental in helping to build St. Peters’ Episcopal Church in its present location near Bon Secour River. Source: The Baldwin County Heritage Book by Ione Swift Jurkiewicz.
  • George Robinson Swift (1887–1972) was born at Swift Post Office in Baldwin County; attended University Military School, Mobile; member, Alabama house of representatives 1931-1935; member, State senate 1935-1939; State highway director 1943-1946; member, State senate 1947-1951. He was appointed U.S. Senator from June to November 1946 to fill the term left by the death of John Bankhead. He was president of Swift-Hunter Lumber Co., of Atmore, Ala.
  • Swift-Roberts Family of Baldwin County
• The Nelson family’s Bon Secour Fisheries, began in 1896 as a small oyster house and has grown into a major seafood processing plant that packs Nelson’s Brand Oysters and other seafood.
  • In 1853 Elisha Nelson bought 600 acres of land from Elizabeth Bailey, the widow of Auguste LaCoste. The land now includes Miller Memorial Cemetery on Old Fort Morgan Road. Auguste had previously been granted this land by the King of Spain.
• John Burton Foley was a Chicago businessman who learned of the opportunities in south Alabama from a man on a train while on his way to the funeral of President William McKinley. A manufacturer of Foley’s Pine Tar and Honey, a patent medicine designed as a cough remedy, Foley soon turned land developer, laying out lots, which he sold for fifty dollars an acre. He also built sawmills, a grist mill and hundreds of miles of roads at his own expense. In 1908, he built Hotel Magnolia.
• George and Erie Meyer implemented a long-range plan for community support in the establishment of The George C. Meyer Foundation through which, under the wise leadership and guidance of Mrs. Meyer as president, land has been gifted for use for churches, public beach, municipal parks, school sites, and to benefit The Faulkner State Community College campus
• Clyde Weir opened Souvenir City in 1956 which has grown from a 100 square foot mom and pop operation to a 32,000 square foot store. In 1969 he built the 118 room Holiday Inn hotel, the first national franchise to come to Gulf Shores, and in 1972 he built an amusement park and later built the town’s first shopping center at the intersection of Highway 59 and Highway 182. Mr. Weir is currently enjoying retirement and busy developing new projects. Recently, he and his daughter donated 25 acres of land to the Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo which will provide a safer location with room to expand.
• R.C. and Robert Craft
• George Fred Woerner, son of German immigrants, moved from New Jersey to Elberta in 1906. He and his wife had 17 children, most of whom were farmers. His son, Edward J. Woerner and his six sons formed the corporation, Edward J. Woerner & Sons, Inc. By the mid-1970’s, the farm had expanded its operations to almost 2000 acres of produce, grain and cattle. In the 1970s, Woerner Turf Farms began.  The Foley was purchased, and other adjacent parcels leased, to add 3477 acres in Baldwin County. Farms in Anniston, Bon Secour, South Florida and Montgomery were added in the 1980s-1990s. Woerner Transportation, Inc. was added in 1990. The Woerner Companies shareholders are George A. Woerner and Roger L. Woerner.
• Jimmy Faulkner:  a former mayor, state senator, two-time candidate for governor and newspaper publisher. Son of a farmer and a schoolteacher, Faulkner was born in Lamar County. He moved to Bay Minette at age 20 and purchased The Baldwin Times newspaper.  Faulkner served as mayor of Bay Minette from 1941 to 1943 at the age of 25. By 1951, Faulkner represented Baldwin County in the state Senate. Faulkner served as chairman of the board of directors for Alabama Christian College in Montgomery which was renamed Faulkner University in 1985. Faulkner also played a key role in bringing Faulkner State Community College to Baldwin. He was founder and president of Loyal American Life Insurance Co. of Mobile, president and director of Gulf Area Insurance Agency in Bay Minette, and owner and publisher of three newspapers in Baldwin from 1936-74. Faulkner served as “consultant” to Volkert and Associates Inc., led industrial development efforts in Baldwin County and was involved in other civic positions. He was named “Person of the Century,” by the North Baldwin Chamber of Commerce in 2000 and awarded the Alabama Press Association’s “Lifetime Achievement Award” in 2003.  He died in 2008 at the age of 92. – PR 8/23/08

Education

• Sanford. D. Bishop Sr.* came to Mobile in 1938 to teach at what was then a branch of Alabama State University. Thanks to his years-long effort, in 1965, the branch became an autonomous junior college. Five years later, the Legislature named it after him. Today, it’s known as Bishop State Community College. He died in 1981. His son, S.D. Bishop Jr., is a congressman from Georgia.
• Fred P. Whiddon*. A native of Newville near Dothan, Whiddon came to Mobile in 1960 with a singular vision: to build a major university here. He was the director of the University of Alabama-Mobile’s, two-year extension campus, and persuaded local leaders and legislators to create a four-year, degree-granting institution. The Legislature approved in 1963; a year later, the ribbon was cut. At the age of thirty three, he was appointed President of the University of South Alabama, at the time the youngest college president in the country. Whiddon personally signed for a $250,000 bank loan to help build the first building. He went to local high schools to recruit students, and worked long hours to attract top professors. Whiddon, while criticized in later years for micro-managing too much, has overseen the expansion of the University of South Alabama to 12,000 students, three hospitals and extensive timberlands and natural gas reserves in assets. Whiddon retired in 1998.
• Gordon Moulton joined the University of South Alabama as a business faculty member in 1966. He later served as founding dean of the School of Computer and Information Sciences and vice president for services and planning. Moulton was named University president in 1998.  Moulton earned his B.S. in Industrial Management from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from Emory University.

Media

• Ralph Chandler*. Chandler came to Mobile from Cincinnati in 1929. He had started the Birmingham Post, then was asked to start a new newspaper in Mobile, which he called the Mobile Press. The competition was fierce with the morning Register, and in just three years, the Register sold to Chandler’s company. Under his outspoken leadership, the newspapers advocated reforms, including putting local officials on salaries instead of letting them collect fees, and installing voting machines to end widespread vote buying, as well as cleaning up bootlegging operations in the county. He was a staunch segregationist and did little to promote racial harmony. He also founded the Chandler Foundation, which gave generously to schools, museums, scholarships and more. Chandler died in 1970, but the foundation, with more than $10 million in assets, exists today as the Hearin-Chandler Foundation.
• William J. Hearin*. Hearin rose through the ranks at the Mobile Press and Mobile Register and succeeded Ralph Chandler as publisher and president in 1970. Hearin promoted business, worked for the completion of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, and helped bring in a number of new industries to the Port City. He was a major stockholder in Mobile Gas (he purchased a majority of shares after selling the Press-Register) and was influential in the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce. He also set up the Chandler Foundation in 1962 and expanded its assets from less than $3 million to more than $10 million today. The foundation, now known as the Hearin-Chandler Foundation, has given millions to local charities, museums, colleges, hospitals, schools and other organizations.
• Kenneth R. Giddens (1908-1993) was an architect and movie theater owner who put two radio stations and one television station in Mobile on the air, all with the call sign “WKRG”. He was born in Pine Apple, Ala., and graduated from Auburn in architecture. Giddens created a chain of movie theaters spanning three states as Giddens & Rester theaters. Giddens and his family would start WKRG-TV, Inc. in 1946, and radio station WKRG went on the air in 1946, followed by WKRG-FM in 1947, and WKRG-TV in 1955. Giddens partnered with Jay Altmayer in the construction of Bel Air Mall. Giddens also served as president of the Alabama Broadcasters Association and the National Broadcasters Association. The Giddens family sold off both the radio and television divisions of WKRG in the 1990s.Giddens also served as director of the Voice of America from 1969 to 1977.
• Uncle Henry is a radio and television commentator in Mobile. He hosts the local radio talk show “The Uncle Henry Show” on WPMI-AM. His alter ego Chris Smith, a Fairhope native and former news anchor for WKRG-AM (now WPMI) in Mobile, conceived of the comical political and social commentator in 1988. According to his creator, Uncle Henry was born in Baldwin County and raised in Mobile. He fought in the Korean War, traveled across the United States in the 1960s, and finally settled in Mobile again to “fight the forces destroying our country.” At night, “Uncle Henry” would call WABB to comment on their “nasty music” selections for the FM station. The Uncle interested WABB into asking him to give on-air editorials. After Smith accepted the job of news reporter for WABB a few months later, he revealed himself to be the curmudgeon who’s been commenting on their station. BAY-TV produced the Uncle’s first television talk show for Comcast Cablevision’s public access channel in 1989, where he conducted interviews with various local people and officials every Friday night before a studio audience. As the Uncle, Smith would appear with a curly women’s wig (the original “President’s Cut” wig was stolen during a Mardi Gras parade), a wide-lapel jacket, and one of over 200 ties collected over time. As for the 26-year-old Smith’s facial appearance, two hours of applying make-up were needed to make the Uncle’s age convincing. From 1990 to 1991, BAY-TV produced a second Uncle Henry series titled “Uncle Henry on the Road”, which featured visits to places such as the Senior Bowl, Jim Busby’s mansion, and Saraland. The Uncle’s third series, “Uncle Henry’s Sunday Funnies” aired on WALA-TV for 10 episodes, featuring Little Rascals shorts and the Uncle’s commentary. The Uncle Henry TV show ended when Smith’s mentor Ron Gollick died in 1991. Smith continued to be the Uncle on his morning talk show on WABB-AM and a morning announcer on the FM station. After eight months in Orlando radio, Chris Smith returned to Mobile radio in 1998, hosting Mike Malone’s former afternoon talk show on WNTM (now WPMI). In 1999, the Uncle returned to public access television in an hour-long “Uncle Henry Special”. In 2002, the Uncle made his return with an hour-long program on WNTM. A brief revival of the Uncle Henry TV show came as a result of the radio show on WNTM. Smith does the  ”Chris and Mary Show”  on LiteMix 99.9. The “Uncle Henry Show” on WPMI-AM 710 is now on weekdays from 8 to 10am and is available by podcast. Note: this biography came from the (now deleted) Wikipedia entry. The Uncle Henry Blog.   Uncle Henry’s MySpace Page. WPMI-AM.
• Carmen Brown first appeared on-air at WBLX in 1978. She moved to G100, WHIL, and then WDLT where “Smooth Jazz Sundays” have the top-rated jazz show in the market. – Kevin Lee, Lagniappe, 3/14/2006
• Doctor Salvo (Jose Salvo e Pensacola) was the pseudonym of Mobile psychiatrist and naturalist Dr. Stonewall Boulet Stickney, who wrote a weekly column in The Harbinger newspaper from 1986 to 1996. He authored the book Ask Doctor Salvo: Brazilian Psychiatry, a collection of his essays, which was published in 1996. As commissioner of the Alabama Department of Mental Health, Dr. Stickney played a crucial role toward inspiring or instigating the landmark 1971 ruling known as “Wyatt vs. Stickney,” which changed the way mental patients were treated in the US. Dr. Stickney died in 1996. His essays are archived here.

Mobile-Baldwin Authors and Historians

Mobile-Baldwin Musicians

Mobile-Baldwin Architects

Mobile-Baldwin Artists

Mobile Bay Environmentalists

• Myrt Jones, was former President of the Mobile Bay Audubon Society, wrote A Gadfly’s Memoirs
  • In the early 1970s, Jones, a registered nurse and housewife, joined Save Our Bay to fight Mobil Oil Company drilling in Mobile Bay. She subsequently joined the Mobile Bay Audubon Society, which had been organized by the Linzey family and others, and became its president.
  • In the early 1990s, (Myrt Jones) the president of the Mobile Bay Audubon Society accompanied officials from Phenolchemie on a company paid tour of their production facilities in Germany and Belgium. Her acceptance of what some described as a European vacation caused considerable division among activists. In 1997, when Phenolchemie invited her on an “informational” tour of its European operations to recruit support for a controversial phenol plant near Mobile, she refused the offer and became an early opponent of the planned facility. She had briefly served on the LeMoyne CAP in 1993 before being voted off the panel and barred from future meetings. – Moberg 2002

Icons

• The Peanut Man: Lamar Wilson, known to Mobilians as “the Peanut Man” for hawking his small paper bags of peanuts under the oaks at the Loop, died in 2005. Wilson’s death at 86 came several months after he sold his last bag of peanuts and was moved to a nursing home. Artist Sheila Hagler of Top of the Hill photographed Wilson in 1989 “in his prime” with his signature cloth-lined picnic basket hooked over his arm (right). Wilson was a member of First Baptist Church of Mobile. He spent much of his time pacing along the road, sometimes holding up bags of peanuts, other times peering into windows to make a sale. He was rumored to have vast wealth, which Hagler has said she doubted. In 1998, as the city started to dry out after Hurricane Georges, a reporter noted that the Peanut Man had taken up his post by the cannon again, prompting Mayor Mike Dow to declare, “Business is back to normal.” He purchased his peanuts at A&M Peanut Shop. Wilson lived within walking distance of the Loop’s cannon at Government Street and Airport Boulevard and he never learned to drive, Langan said. Former Mayor Joseph Langan was Wilson’s lawyer and oversaw a trust established by Wilson’s mother. Mike Langan assumed that role after Joseph Langan, his uncle, died. Besides managing the trust, Mike Langan took over the duty of buying Wilson’s groceries. He described Wilson as “kind of like a child in a lot of ways, very trusting of people. … He kind of took people at their word until they did something that would prove them not to be.” Wilson was occasionally robbed, an easy target with the wads of bills sticking out of his pockets. He had one sister, who died in infancy, and a brother, Langan said. He is survived by three Mobile relatives, niece Karen Wilson Leonard and nephews William “Bill” Wilson and David L. Wilson. – PR

Science

• Alfred Henry Sturtevant (1891–1970) was a geneticist who constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1913. Throughout his career he worked on the organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) with Thomas Hunt Morgan. Sturtevant Biography.
  • Alfred Henry Sturtevant was born in Illinois, but when Sturtevant was seven years old, his father quit his teaching job and moved the family to Kushla to pursue farming. Sturtevant attended a one room schoolhouse until entering high school in Mobile. As a child, Sturtevant had created pedigrees of his father’s horses. He pursued his interest in genetics under Thomas Hunt Morgan, who encouraged him to publish a paper of his pedigrees shown through Mendelian genetics.
  • Sturtevant collected melanogaster everywhere he went, especially from his own home town of Kushla, and brought them back to the laboratory at Columbia.
  • Sturtevant worked at Columbia University and then at the California Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics and remained for the rest of his career. By watching the development of flies in which the earliest cell division produced two different genomes, he measured the embryonic distance between organs in a unit which is called the “sturt” in his honor. In 1967, Sturtevant received the National Medal of Science. – Wikipedia
  • Sturtevant’s most notable discoveries include the principle of genetic mapping, the first reparable gene defect, the principle of underlying fate mapping, the phenomena of unequal crossing-over, and position effect. His main contributions to science include his analysis of genetic “linkage groups,” which became classical method of chromosome mapping that we still use today. In 1913, he determined that genes were arranged on chromosomes in a linear fashion, like beads on a necklace. He also showed that the gene for any specific trait was in a fixed location (locus). Sturtevant’s History of Genetics
• John Fowler, a Mobile watchmaker, developed one of the first heavier-than-air machines to fly at Brookley Field. Fowler’s numerous designs incorporated concepts that were advanced for the time, such as wing warping for flight control. Fowler’s work caught the interest of the Wright brothers, who incorporated some of the design elements they saw at Brookley into their own Wright Flyer. – EADS CASA Website, PR 3/30/1997
  • Fowler constructed a motor-powered aircraft in the mid- to late-1890s in a field near Magnolia Cemetery. Purportedly, the plane sat on a five-foot platform ready to zoom down a sloped runway to the ground. The engines would be revved, a cable released, and the plane would catapult along the runway and up into the air. But according to accounts, a riot ensued at the park when Fowler had his plane ready to launch.
  • Fowler later reported flying a tethered plane in a storm. Fowler turned his attentions to building an autogyro seaplane at Monroe Park in the 1920s. It was meant to seat 22 passengers, and go straight up in the air.
  • Tom Crouch, author of “The Bishop’s Boys,” a biography of the Wright brothers, said the Wrights kept extensive notes on their research, and credited their influences. He concluded they made no trip to Mobile in which they viewed Fowler’s inventions and appropriated his ideas.
• E.O. Wilson is a prominent biologist and conservationist, with research and theory in sociobiology and biodiversity. He was born in Birmingham, and grew up in Mobile. He began a survey of the ants of Alabama as a teenager, including the first report of red imported fire ants in the U.S. in 1942 (the lot at 552 Charleston St., Mobile, next door to his house at 550) at the age of thirteen. He attended the University of Alabama as an undergraduate and received his Ph.D. from Harvard. His autobiography is titled Naturalist. Other books include Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006. E. O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation 

Medicine

• Henry LeVert was the son of Dr. Claudeus LeVert, who came to Virginia as fleet surgeon under General Rochambeau. He was a physician in Mobile from 1829 to 1864. Dr. LeVert’s Office from 1858 to 1864 was at 153 Government St. Dr LeVert was married to Olivia Walton LeVert.
• Josiah Clark Nott (1804–1873) was a surgeon born in South Carolina, and resided from 1833 in Mobile. In 1858, Dr. Nott, with several friends (James F. Heustis, William H. Anderson, George A. Ketchum, Francis A. Ross, and Frederick E. Gordon) founded the Medical College of Alabama in Mobile County. Serving as the Professor of Surgery, in 1860 Dr. Nott successfully appealed to the Legislature for a State Charter and $50,000 appropriation. The school served Alabama from 1859-1920 and a substantial percentage of its 1,358 graduates came from other states and foreign countries. Dr. Nott served as a surgeon, staff officer, and hospital inspector during the Civil War, in which he lost both soldier sons. Dr. Nott has been mentioned as one of the most prominent scientists in the pre-Civil War south. He took up theories that the mosquito was a vector for malaria, and applied them to yellow fever, then a serious health problem of the American South. In his 1850 Yellow Fever Contrasted with Bilious Fever he attacked the prevailing miasma theory. His racial theories were put forth in a book of essays, from 1854. Entitled Types of Mankind or Ethnological Research, it successfully popularized the polygenist theory, of separate origins of races of humans.
• Jerome Cochran opened his practice in Mobile in 1865. He started the organization of public health clinics beginning in Mobile and extended to all of Alabama. In 1870, he founded the State Department of Public Health. He initiated the formation of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama in 1873 and was the first senior censor. He was also the guiding force in the development of strict educational and ethical standards for medical licensure in the state.
• Dr. Eugene Dubose Bondurant was dean of the University of Alabama School of Medicine in 1912; and Dr. Tucker H. Frazer, a later dean of the same university.
• William Crawford Gorgas is known as “the conqueror of Yellow Fever”. He was born in Toulminville. Gorgas was made Surgeon General of the Army in 1914, in which position he was able to capitalize on the work of Major Walter Reed, who had himself capitalized on insights of a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, to prove the mosquito transmission of yellow fever. As such, Gorgas won international fame battling the illness first in Florida, later in Havana, Cuba and finally at the Panama Canal. He did this by implementing far-reaching sanitatary programs including the draining of ponds and swamps. It is generally considered that these measures were instrumental in permitting the construction of the Panama Canal.
• James Fountain Heustis (1828-1891). Born in Dallas County, Ala. He was a naval surgeon and later professor at the Medical College of Alabama.  He married Rachel Lyons, and his ten children included artist Louise Lyons Heustis. The Mobile Medical Museum (Eichold-Heustis Medical Museum) began in 1962 with a gift of his papers donated by his dauphter Patricia Heustis Paterson under the encouragement of Sam Eichold. His portrait is listed in the Smithsonian database. Article on the Treatment of Fractures (1885).
• Claudius Henry Mastin, a prominent nineteenth-century Mobile physician, was the founder of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons and one of the organizers of the American Surgical Association.
• George A. Ketchum was a prominent physician, civic leader and president of the Bienville Water Works. The Acantus Fountain in Bienville Square was built in his honor. His office was in the Joseph Silver House, 257 St. Francis St.
• Sam Eichold*. Eichold, a physician, started Camp Seale Harris in eastern Alabama in 1947 for children with diabetes. In 1973, Dr. Eichold left his private practice and became a charter member of the University of South Alabama College Of Medicine, where he remained active until his death. He also founded the continuing medical education department at the University of South Alabama, as well as the Eichold-Heustis Medical Museum in 1962. Property he purchased and renovated includes the B.C. Turner Building on Dauphin Street, which he renovated as the new home for the Mobile Arts Council. He wrote wrote the Without Malice history of the Comic Cowboys in 1984. He died in 2006 at the age of 96.  Alabama Health Care Hall of Fame.
• James A. Franklin, the only African American to graduate from the University of Michigan in 1914 and for whom the Franklin Memorial Clinics are named, practiced medicine for 53 years.
• Ernest DeBakey’s general surgery practice in South Alabama spanned six decades and over 40,000 major surgical procedures. He was the brother of famed heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. A patient’s ability to pay was never a concern to him. After his retirement in 1993, Dr. DeBakey continued to help others, having given millions of dollars to worthy healthcare causes including scholarships for residents and nurses. Dr. DeBakey created a drug education program and “drug bus” that has reached over 20,000 grade school students. He donated over a million dollars to Mobile Infirmary for new facilities and equipment. The Ernest G. DeBakey Charitable Foundation was established in 1977 to benefit medical research and education.
• William Hannon was an orthopaedic surgeon with a 40 year career of caring for crippled children in Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. He conducted Alabama’s first crippled children’s clinic, and until his death served as the medical advisor for the State Crippled Children’s Service, now known as Children’s Rehabilitation Services. At one time Dr. Hannon provided care to 24 medical clinics in a 17 county area. Dr. Hannon helped found the Rotary Rehabilitation Center in Mobile.
• William Cooner founded of the Mobile Urology Group in 1965 and served as president of the American Association of Clinical Urologists
• E.C. “Pete” Bramlett Sr. oversaw the growth of the Mobile Infirmary from a 150-bed facility to its present size of 704 beds, the largest non-governmental hospital in the state. During his twenty-five year tenure as hospital administrator, Mobile Infirmary developed one of the first cardiac intensive care units and one of the first neuro-intensive care units (with Dr. Robert Mudd of Coastal Neurological Institute) in the Southeast. It also developed the largest surgical service and the most active obstetrical service in the state. Under Mr. Bramlett’s leadership, the hospital grew with minimal bonded indebtedness and enjoyed one of the lowest per diem cost rates in the Southeast. As president of the Southeastern Hospital Conference, he helped form the first continuing education programs for healthcare executives.
• Chandler Bramlett was President/CEO of Infirmary Health System, the parent company of Mobile Infirmary Medical Center. During his twenty seven year tenure, Infirmary Health System grew from a single hospital to become the largest not for profit healthcare delivery system in the Gulf Coast region. Mr.Bramlett has spearheaded the infusion of millions of dollars from the Infirmary Foundation to public health programs. Bramlett has played an important role in establishing the public school nurse program along with the recently opened Victory Health Partners’Clinic for the uninsured.
• Celia Wallace is owner and CEO of Springhill Memorial Hospital and Southern Hospital Medical Systems, Inc.  She is the wife of its founder, Dr. Gerald Wallace. She rejected a $40 million offer for the hospital in 1994. She was formerly the owner of the Battle House Hotel, before selling it to the Retirement Systems of Alabama for renovation. She also owned the YMCA Building. She is one of the developers of the high-rise Apalachee in Daphne. She pledged $1 million to the University of Alabama to endow a chair of family medicine in honor of Dr. Gerald Wallace.
• Laura Gaillard was the founding president of the Mobile Infirmary Auxiliary in 1950, becoming Chairman of the Board of Directors of Mobile Infirmary Association for over 20 years, to having actively served on the Infirmary Foundation’s Board of Directors for 13 years
• Regina Benjamin (1956 – ) is a family practice physician at the Bayou La Batre Health Clinic who was nominated in 2009 to be Surgeon General of the United States by President Barack Obama. She was born in Mobile and graduated from Fairhope High School in 1975. She received her M.D. degree from the University of Alabama Birmingham, and M.B.A. from Tulane University. She is former associate dean for rural health at the University of South Alabama’s College of Medicine. She the first black and first female president of the Medical Association of Alabama, she has also served on the American Medical Association’s board of trustees. – Wikipedia

Religion

• Bishop Michael Portier (1795-1851) was the first Bishop of Mobile. Portier was born in Montbrison, France, in 1795. He volunteered to assist his bishop in Louisiana. He worked in New Orleans and St. Louis until he was appointed Vicar-Apostolic of Alabama and the Floridas in 1826, which included Pensacola and St. Augustine. At the time there were only 2 priests in the area, both of whom shortly left. He became Bishop of Mobile in 1829, which he remained for thirty years. He founded Spring Hill College in 1830 and the Visitation Monastery in 1833. He supervised the construction of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.
• Bishop John Quinlan (1826-1883) was the second Bishop of Mobile. He emigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1844 and was named Bishop of Mobile in 1859. In his diocese he found twelve churches and fourteen schools for which he had only eight secular priests and he therefore brought from Ireland eleven young candidates for the priesthood. Bishop Quinlan accompanied a relief train to the site of the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 and ministered in the field to the wounded and dying. Besides repairing ruined churches, Bishop Quinlan built the portico of the Mobile cathedral, founded St. Patrick’s and St. Mary’s churches in Mobile, and established churches in Huntsville, Decatur, Tuscumbia, Florence, Cullman, Birmingham, Eufaula, Whistler, and Toulminville. He is entombed under the portico of the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. Quinlan Hall, on the campus of Spring Hill College, is named in his honor. – Wikipedia
• Bishop Thomas J. Toolen* (1886-1976) was born in Baltimore and appointed Bishop of Mobile in 1927. Under his direction, the church erected convents, parish halls, hospitals, rectories, high schools and grade schools in a host of communities and neighborhoods in southern Alabama. He established Bishop Toolen High School in 1928. Toolen Hall, on the campus of Spring Hill College, is named in his honor.
• Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb, was born in Mobile. He is the first Archbishop of Mobile and its eighth bishop. He attended McGill-Toolen, where an athletic complex is named in his honor. Lipscomb served as a parish priest in Mobile and as an educator at McGill Institute and Spring Hill College. He was appointed Archbishop of Mobile and the Diocese of Mobile was elevated to the Archdiocese of Mobile in 1980. In 2006, Lipscomb turned 75, which required him to submit his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI.
• Richard Wilmer, the second Episcopal Bishop of Mobile, founded Wilmer Hall in 1864.

Historical Persons

Colonists

• Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville was a French Canadian naval hero who was sent by King Louis XIV to settle the Gulf Coast.  He arrived in Mobile in 1699, founded Fort Maurepas near Biloxi, then chose the site for Old Mobile with his younger brother Bienville.
• Jean-Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville came from a family of wealthy merchants in Montréal. Orphaned at the age of ten, his older brothers raised him.
  • He spent several years fighting the English navy in the North Atlantic and Hudson Bay before coming down the Mississippi in 1698 to help establish Fort La Boulaye at the lower part of the river. Bienville later commanded Fort Maurepas, (near present day Biloxi, Mississippi).
  • In 1701 his brother Iberville asked him to come to Mobile Bay and help establish the colony’s new capital. Bienville was just twenty-two years old when Iberville sailed for France in 1702 and left his younger brother in charge of the new settlement on the Mobile River.
  • After construction of the fort was underway and plans for the new town were set in motion, Bienville immediately began his campaign to make allies of surrounding Indian nations. He first successfully negotiated peace between the Choctaws and the Chickasaws. In 1704 the Apalachees arrived in Mobile, refugees from the Spanish missions around Tallahassee. A year earlier Bienville had invited this group to settle near Fort Louis, which they chose over the Spaniards at Pensacola.
  • He was not always respected by the early settlers. He was often held responsible for the lack of food and supplies from which the colonists suffered. In attempts to alleviate the poor distribution of food, he more than once came to blows with the commissary, or keeper of the King’s storehouse, Nicolas La Salle. La Salle wrote several letters to France, accusing Bienville of profiting from the sale of the King’s property, eventually leading to an investigation by officials from the court. Bienville’s authority was also challenged by the often indignant parish priest, La Vente. After years of disagreement about the construction of a new church, Bienville actually locked La Vente out of the fort’s chapel.
  • Antoinè Lamothe Cadillac replaced Bienville as Governor of Mobile from 1712 to 1717, and Bienville left Mobile shortly afterward to found New Orleans in 1718.
• Henri de Tonti (de Tontey), a French-born Sicilian, first served in North America with Robert Cavalier de La Salle at the age of twenty-eight when La Salle voyaged down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Tonti lost his right hand in a grenade explosion when he was a young soldier, and was called “Bras-de-fer,” or Iron Hand, by the Indians. Soon Although La Salle’s colonizing efforts ended in disaster along the Texas coast, Tonti continued working for over twenty years to establish a fur trade in the Mississippi Valley. During this time he became known as a successful businessman, frontiersman, fighter, and diplomat.
  • From 1683 to 1702, Tonti ran several trading posts in the Illinois Country, built Fort Saint Louis on the Illinois River, and established a post on the Arkansas River in 1686. Over the course of his twenty-year fur-trading venture, Tonti canoed up and down the Mississippi River six times.
  • It was probably his letters to officials in France about the possibilities of English encroachment westward from Virginia and the Carolinas that led King Louis XIV to sponsor Iberville’s expeditions and the establishment of Fort Louis de La Louisiane on the Mobile River.
  • In Mobile he commanded the Canadian soldiers and was an essential figure in the success of the small French outpost.
  • After arriving at Fort Louis, Commandant Iberville sent him on a mission to invite the Choctaw and Chickasaw to make peace with each other and the French.
  • De Tonti died from yellow fever in September 1704. He was engaged to a young Indian woman, but he died before they married.
• Henri Roulleaux de La Vente was around fifty years old and an experienced missionary priest when he arrived at Mobile in 1704.
  • La Vente maintained a correspondence with his superiors in Paris and Québec. His early letters speak of the poor health of the colonists and the need for supplies and additional missionaries. In letters he included a detailed list of supplies needed for the parish church and for making existence in Louisiana more bearable. La Vente seemed more interested in securing all the comforts of a parish priest in France. He even requested that materials be sent for the construction of a billiard table.
  • La Vente constantly badgered Bienville about the construction of a parish church. Not until 1708 did the commandant finally begin building a church, but he left it to La Vente to supply the windows, door, and roof.
  • Another of La Vente’s primary concerns was the lack of white women for the colonists to marry. Many men purchased Indian slave women to serve as live-in housekeepers. La Vente was initially upset by this practice, and he constantly wrote to his superiors requesting support for his position. However, after several years at Mobile, La Vente changed his mind and began to perform marriage ceremonies on the Frenchmen and their female Indian companions. He anticipated the reaction of his superiors when he wrote, in 1708, that the intermarriage of French and Indians would not “have any ill effect on the blood of the French.”
  • One letter, entitled “General Memoir of Merchandise,” requests glass beads, knives, brightly colored fabric, and trade muskets, among other goods. He probably hoped to alleviate the poor financial state of the new parish through regular trade with neighboring Indians. The commandant of the colony, Bienville, saw this commerce as unbefitting the duties of a parish priest and sternly accused La Vente of selling the King’s merchandise at exorbitant prices. It was these accusations that eventually led to La Vente’s return to Paris in 1710.
• Nicolas de La Salle, nephew of Robert Cavalier de la Salle, landed at Massacre Island (Dauphin Island) in January 1702, accompanied by his wife, Madeleine, and their three sons, Nicolas, Simon, and François. He had come to Louisiana as commissary of the new colony.
  • He already had experience in Louisiana from a 1682 trip down the Mississippi River with the Cavalier de La Salle and Henri de Tonti.
  • Within two years of his arrival at Mobile, his wife and youngest son died. When the Pélican docked at Massacre Island in 1704 with its cargo of brides-to-be, La Salle had already reserved one for himself. He married Jeanne-Catherine de Berenhardt and soon began a family with her. But tragedy again entered La Salle’s life in 1705 with the death of a son and in 1708 when his daughter, Marie, died. Jeanne-Catherine became ill herself and in 1710, she too passed away.
  • His responsibilities included insuring the proper distribution of goods from the warehouse on Dauphin Island and from the storerooms at Old Mobile to the colonists. In order for any goods to be released from the storerooms, a written order had to be signed by Commandant Bienville and approved by La Salle. During times of shortage it was especially difficult for La Salle to control the removal of goods from the storehouse and to keep accurate books.
  • He probably did not expect that his most ardent adversary in managing the merchandise would be Bienville. In 1706 issues between La Salle and Bienville about control of the King’s goods resulted in tumultuous arguments and a division of the colonists between those who supported Bienville and those who backed La Salle. He wrote several letters to French authorities complaining of Bienville’s illegal access to the storehouse and unchecked use of the supplies inside. Unfortunately, for almost every complaint against Bienville that La Salle sent to authorities, Bienville had written one too. In 1710, La Salle died of influenza, never having known of the letter that arrived a few months after his death, calling for his dismissal and immediate return to France.
• Andre Penicaut, a ship-carpenter, came with Iberville on the Badine in 1699 and wrote his Annals of Louisiana from 1698 to 1722.
• Nicolas Bodin was another founder of Old Mobile. He later moved to the Fowl River area. Bodin, a thirty-one year old who had recently arrived from Mont Louis in France, traveled downstream to the southernmost corner of the bay near where the same riviere-aux-poules forked to form an island.
• Charles Rochon was a French Canadian who settled in the Louisiana colony in 1701 with Iberville.
  • In 1733, within one month Charles, his wife Henriette, and two children died, leaving an orphaned family of 9 children headed by two brothers, 17-year-old Charles and 16-year-old Pierre. His wife was the daughter of Jean Baptiste “Laviolette” Colon, another voyageur who traveled with Henry De Tonti and Robert LaSalle.
  • In 1714, owned he owned 1,000 cattle on Hollinger’s Island. He established the Dog River Plantation in the 1720s.
  • By the 1750s Charles’ son Pierre were raising cattle, manufacturing brick, lumber, and naval stores, and building and repairing ships at the Dog River Plantation. After his wife’s death, Pierre began a relationship with his mulatto slave named Marianne, who gave birth to six children.
  • Charles Orbanne Demouy,  Pierre Rochon’s nephew, acquired the Dog River Plantation around 1780. The Demouy family lived part of the year at the Dog River Plantation and another plantation on the Tombigbee River, while maintaining a home in Mobile. Demouy also had children by one of his slaves; this second family lived at the Tombigbee River plantation. The plantation is now being excavated by the University of South Alabama Center for Archaeological Studies
  • Another son, Augustin Rochon, established a plantation in what is now Spanish Fort around 1760. Augustin Rochon died in 1780.
    • The plantation was burned later in 1780 after the fall of British Mobile to a besieging Spanish army. A raiding party of Choctaw Indians, allies of the British, attacked and burned the plantation. The Choctaws killed four members of the household, then carried off the Widow Rochon  and her children, along with her daughter Marie Louise and her husband Charles Orbanne Demouy (who lived at the Dog River plantation), and two slaves. The captives were taken to Pensacola, where the the British commandant saw that the prisoners were the Prominent Rochon family of Mobile, he hastily secured their release and sent them back to Mobile under his protection.. The Widow Rochon and her family never again lived at their plundered Mobile Bay plantation.
  • Extensive archaeological work has been undertaken at the sites of the Dog River and Augustin Rochon Plantations.
    • In 1998, the expanding residential neighborhood of Spanish Fort included private development on the Rochon Plantation site. With landowners’ permission, the University of South Alabama Center for Archaeological Studies excavated portions of the site before their loss to construction.
    • See: Plantation Archaeology at Riviere aux Chiens, ca. 1725-1848. By Gregory A. Waselkov and Bonnie L. Gums. Mobile: University of South Alabama Center for Archaeological Studies, 2000.
• Sieur Pierre de Juzan was Intendent of the estates of the Count of Ponchartrain, Commissioner of Marine.
  • Maj. Pierre Gabriel de Juzan, his son, was killed in combat against Chickasaw Indians 5/22/1736 in the Battle of Akia, Tupelo, Mississippi Territory.
  • Maj. Juzan in 1704 in old Mobile, wed Marie Francoise Trudeau, the daughter of aide Maj. Francois Trudeau who’s wife, Mme. Jeanne Louise Burelle, was a “Pelican Girl”. Maj. Trudeau in1702 built Mobile’s first fort.
• Jean-Baptiste Baudreau de Graveline (1671-1762) was an affluent landowner, entrepreneur and farmer who raised cattle. He was married three times, including a Choctaw princess, and outlived two of his wives. He was the father of a son and daughter, but later in life he would disinherit the son. An affluent landowner, entrepreneur and farmer who raised cattle, he was married three times and outlived two of his wives. He was the father of a son and daughter, but later in life he would disinherit the son, who was executed in New Orleans for insurrection against the government. He acquired property from Dauphin Island to Louisiana. – PR 2/24/02
• The Founders of Old Mobile Society was created for all proven descendants of founders of Old Mobile who lived at the Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff settlement between 1702 and 1711. It was organized by Jay Higginbotham and Elizabeth Mayrose.
• According to legend, Prince Madoc of Wales sailed across the Atlantic in 1170 AD, sailed up Mobile Bay and made contact with Indians in Kentucky.

French Settlers

• The Chastang Brothers, Joseph Chastang (1736-1815) and Jean Baptiste (Dr. John) Chastang (1739-1813), were born in New Orleans and settled in the Mobile area around 1760.
  • Joseph Chastang owned sizeable property, including 800 acres on the bluffs above the Tensaw River as well as on the Tombigbee River, and was identified as a land claimant during the Spanish period and at the American Land Claims in 1809. He also had lots on St. Charles, Government, and Royal Sts. in Mobile. His primary residence was at the St. Louis Plantation, on the west side of the Mobile River, about three miles north of Mobile; he would retreat to his home in the City of Mobile when Indian troubles arose. The inventory of his estate, in 1815, included slaves, 50 horned cattle, horses, half of the St. Louis Plantation, and a house on St. Peter Street in Mobile. – Chastang Central
  • Dr John Chastang was a surgeon and prominent land owner in the Mobile area, having received a large land grant in 1756. His residence was on Spira and Pincus’ corner, according to Hamilton.
    • John’s brother, Joseph, purchased a slave named Louison, with whom Dr. John fell in love. In 1780 Joseph sold Louison to John and John freed her the same year. They were companions for 20 years until John’s death. They had 10 children together: Auguste, Edward Z., Marguerite, Bazile (aka Basil, Baxille), Eugene, Pierre Zeno, Isabella, Philip; Louisa, and John Baptiste. The Chastangs became one of the largest families in the Creole community.
    • The town of Chastang and the nearby Chastang Bluff on the Mobile River were both named for Dr. John, and is where many Creole descendants still live. Ten roads in southwest Alabama are named Chastang or Chestang. Dr. John’s Creole sons and daughters built upon their inheritance to become significant farmers and land owners in the Mobile area
  • Bazile Chastang formed a partnership for raising cattle in 1804, acquired substantial property around present day Prichard and Chickasabogue, and became one of the wealthiest free blacks in Alabama. About 1826, Bazile petitioned the Alabama Legislature to allow him to free a family of slaves whom he owned–Nancy and her four children, Gertrude, Francois, Catherine, and Fostin. These were Bazile’s children with Nancy.
• Adam Hollinger (c.1741-1809) was born in Ireland. He was a well-known Indian countryman named in a 1786 Spanish land grant.
  • Hollinger was an Indian trader who spent much of his time living among the tribal nations, especially the Creeks. Adam was known to have fathered at least one child, William, by a Creek Indian woman, Elizabeth Moniac, a daughter of the famous Creek Chief Moniac. He married Marie Francois Lefleau (LeFlore) and second Mary Josephine Juzan (daughter of Pierre Juzan), with whom he had 5 children.
  • Hollinger established a 640 acre plantation near Mount Vernon on the Tensaw River. He also had a house on Hollinger’s Island at the mouth of the Dog River. Hollinger owned a large tract of land on Cut Off Island. He operated a large cattle ranch.
  • Hollinger established Hollingers Ferry in 1797, the flat boat ferry on the Tombigbee River which was the only crossing between Fort Stoddert and Fort Mims.
• Pierre Lorandini was the progenitor of the Laurendines in Alabama, a French soldier who came to Mobile in 1719. One son, Edward Laurendine, is the ancestor of the Caucasian line. Another son, Jean Baptiste Laurendine Sr., is the ancestor of the Creole branch, through his son, John Baptiste Jr.

British Mobile

• Major Robert Farmar was commander of the British regiments in Mobile from 1763-1765. He resigned his commission in 1768 and was elected to every Commons House of Assembly for the District of West Florida from 1769 until his death in 1778. When he left the army, Farmar retired to his plantation, Farm Hall. Farmar built the plantation in 1772 that encompassed what is now the town of Stockton. Botanist William Bartram visited Farmar 1775, and described the plantation in his Travels.
• John McGillivray, cousin of Lachlan McGillivray, was a prominent merchant in Mobile

Spanish Mobile

• Don Miguel Eslava came to Mobile with the Spanish in 1784, when the area was seized from Great Britain. He was previously Manager of the mint in Mexico City, and at Fort Rosalie he was Commissary for the King of Spain from 1782-1784. From 1784 in Mobile and throughout Spanish rule in his area,he was Commissary and Notary, Collector of Customs, and Treasurer of Spanish Louisiana. He was also Superintendent of the Spanish hospital in Mobile and Mobile’s first elected treasurer in 1814. He remained in Mobile after it was occupied by the United States in 1813. His descendants held extensive French and Spanish land grants in Baldwin and Mobile Counties
• Don Diego Miguel Alvarez came to Mobile in his own sailing ship, the Marie Louise. Don Diego was given a large territorial grant on Bayou Sara by the King of Spain. Alvarez received a grant on the north side of Chickasabogue from Don Vincent Folch in 1787, and Alvarez noted he had already lived on the site for five years. Don Diego’s home was on the northwest corner of what is now Bienville Square.

19^th Century Mobile

• Kennedy Brothers: The Kennedy Brothers, sons of Joseph Kennedy, were born in South Carolina. They moved to Mobile during the early 1800s and swore allegiance to the Spanish king and converted to Catholicism, and, as a result, were allowed to buy and sell property. By the time Mobile came under American control, they were some the largest landholders in the area. They bought most of what is now downtown Mobile from Thomas Price, Indian interpreter who had received Spanish land grants.
  • William E. Kennedy was a physician. Around 1797-1798, he killed a Col. Maxwell, a prominent local citizen/politician in a duel in South Carolina, for which he was tried and acquitted of murder. By 1803-1805, William showed up in Mobile, swore allegiance to the Spanish king, and proceeded to buy up large tracts of property in Mobile and Baldwin and St. Stephens counties. He sold the land for the Church Street Cemetery to the city in 1819. He was married to Martha D’Olive, sister of Louis D’Olive. Dr. William reportedly became an alcoholic and signed a power of attorney to his brother, Joshua, to manage his estate for the benefit of his children. After 1827, the children of Dr. William E. Kennedy were raised by Joshua as were those of the brother Joseph Pulaski, who also died in 1825 in the Yellow Fever epidemic that resulted in the death of William.
  • Joshua Kennedy and his brother Joseph Pulaski had followed William E. to the Mobile area by 1810. Joshua Kennedy married Susanna, daughter of Samuel Kitchens Jr.
    • In 1811, Joshua Kennedy and Jesse Ember entered into an agreement to build Alabama’s first sawmill at Rains Creek, one mile south of Stockton. He received restitution from the U.S. Congress for destruction of his mill and property on the Tensaw River by Creek Indians in 1813, which was being used as a garrison for US troops. In 1993, archaeologists and local residents were working with the Alabama Highway Department to protect what remains of the structure as two new bridges for Alabama 225 were built on top of the mill site.
    • At the time of his death in 1838 at age 61, he was reported to be the wealthiest man in the state of Alabama, leaving an estate valued in excess of $1.25 million, including roughly 1/4 of all the land and developed business in the city of Mobile and more than 41,000 acres in nearby Baldwin Co., and two schooners. William R. Hallett and Robert L. Walker were executors of his estate and guardians of his minor children.
  • Joseph Pulaski Kennedy was an attorney who resided at St. Stephens and a Major in the militia. He was actively involved in several engagements against the Creeks, most notably as the leader of the relief party after the massacre at Fort Mims in 1813.
• James Innerarity ran the Mobile branch of John Forbes & Co. He was the nephew of William Panton of Panton, Leslie, & Co. He was the first (and third) mayor of Mobile.
  • After the death of his wife Heloise (Trouillet) in 1820, James moved the family sugar  plantation in the Matanzas Province of Cuba.
  • His son was Dr. John Forbes Innerarity (1813-1868), who was graduated from Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, and the Royal College of Surgeons, London, was a physician in Mobile.
• Harry Toulmin (1766-1823), a Unitarian (Dissenting) minister in Britain, emigrated across the Atlantic in search of religious freedom and tolerance in 1793. Traveling with his wife and children, and equipped with letters of introduction from Joseph Priestley to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Toulmin sailed to Norfolk, Virginia. Toulmin was appointed the Secretary of State of Kentucky in 1796.
  • In 1804 President Jefferson appointed Toulmin superior court judge for the Tombigbee district of the Mississippi Territory (now southwest Alabama). The only civil government representative in a vast, sparsely settled wilderness region, he acted as judge, diplomat, postmaster, and road-surveyor. He also performed weddings and funerals and practiced medicine. During his administration two great waves of migration increased the population of his district more than tenfold. He strove to bring order, stability, and the rule of law to a frontier outpost threatened from without by foreign powers and from within by unruly settlers and warring Indian tribes.
  • The settlers of his jurisdiction objected to Spanish control of Mobile Bay, which isolated them from New Orleans and the Mississippi River. In 1805 Toulmin appealed in their behalf to Congress and to the Spanish for relief from Spanish tariffs, embargoes, and confiscations. In 1807 Toulmin arrested Aaron Burr, rumored head of a conspiracy to create a new independent state in the southwest. He used his influence to prevent warfare with the Spanish. In 1810 a group of adventurers organized the “Mobile Society” to liberate Mobile and Pensacola. Although personally favoring annexation of West Florida, Toulmin advised a grand jury that such unauthorized invasions were illegal and not in the interest of the United States. Shortly afterward, he sacrificed some of his popularity by arresting three would-be liberators. Those he had arrested attempted unsuccessfully to have Toulmin impeached by Congress. During the Creek Wars of 1811-13 he tried to impartially investigate the wrongs committed on all sides, but was unable to reconcile the warring parties.
  • In 1819 Toulmin took part in the Alabama statehood convention and was subsequently elected to the new Alabama legislature. He was the first person to codify the laws of Mississippi and Alabama. Toulmin had a plantation near Fort Stoddard, Alabama on which he grew cotton. Although he had been appalled by slavery when he first encountered it upon his arrival in Virginia, he later came to own slaves. In his will he made provision for the emancipation of one of his slaves as “he is fit for freedom which few negroes are.” Toulmin died on his plantation in 1823 and was buried in the lost town of Washington Court House.
  • Gen. Theophilus Lindsey Toulmin, son of Harry Toulmin, built the Creole-style Toulmin-Buck House in 1828. The house was moved in 1978 to the University of South Alabama campus. He also founded the town of Toulminville when he bought the St. Louis Tract owned by Joseph Chastang in 1825. The Toulimin Family Burial Ground was moved from Toulminvile to Spring Hill Cemetery in 1964.
  • Harry Theophilus Toulmin, grandson of Harry Toulimin, entered the Confederate army as private in 1861; he rose through grades to Colonel, commanding the twenty-second Alabama infantry.  In 1870-72 he was a member of the State legislature. In 1874-82 he was state circuit judge; and from 1886 he was a United States judge for the southern district of Alabama. His father built the Toulmin-Buck house at Toulminville in 1828, where he lived.
• Henry Hitchcock, grandson of Ethan Allen, was Alabama’s first Attorney General and first millionaire. He arrived in Mobile from Vermont in 1817. In the mid-1830s he was converted by the Rev. William T. Hamilton of the Government Street Presbyterian Church. Hitchcock put his wealth behind that church and encouraged the noted Greek Revival architects Charles Dakin and James Gallier to move to Mobile. While here, they designed the Government Street Presbyterian Church and Barton Academy, both at Hitchcock’s behest. Tragically, several other important buildings for which Hitchcock was responsible have been lost. The greatest was the United States Hotel at the corner of Government and Royal. By the time of his death from yellow fever in 1839, he had served as secretary of the territory of Alabama, won election as the state’s first attorney general, sat on the bench of the Alabama Supreme Court, and begun a term in the state legislature.
• Octavia Walton LeVert was born in 1811 near Augusta, Georgia, the granddaughter of George Walton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. In 1835, she moved with her family to Mobile, where she married French physician, Dr. Henry LeVert. From their elegant house on Government Street, she entertained internationally known persons, and she became one of the most widely known socialites of the 1850’s. She was a friend of such notables as Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Henry Clay. During her travels in Europe she was presented to the Pope, to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and to Napoleon and Eugenie. Although Madame Le Vert is remembered primarily as a socialite, after the poverty and misery she saw in Europe distressed her, she had a role in painting the bleak life of a working-class woman. Her Souvenirs of Travel, which recorded her two trips to Europe in the 1850’s, is the only book that madame Le Vert wrote; however, much has been written about her remarkable life.
• Raphael Semmes (1809-1877) was a Rear Admiral in the Confederate Navy and commander of the CSS Alabama, which was sunk off Cherbourg, France, in1864. He was born in Maryland. Semmes entered the Navy, and in 1842 bought land in Alabama.  In 1849 Semmes moved from his home on the Perdido River, near Pensacola, to Mobile. After the capture of Fort Sumter, Semmes took over command of the CSS Sumter, the only ship in the Confederate Navy at that point.  Forced to abandon the ship at Gibraltar, he purchased the CSS Alabama from shipbuilders in neutral Britain.  The Alabama was a highly effective vessel, seizing or destroying 69 Union ships over its career before being defeated by the USS Kearsarge in June 1864.  Promoted to rear admiral, he took command of the James River squadron that protected the Confederate capitol of Richmond.  Forced to flee when Richmond fell, he finally surrendered to Union forces at Greensboro. President Johnson granted Semmes a pardon in May 1865, and he returned to Alabama.  Upon landing at Mobile, he was arrested by order of Navy Secretary Gideon Welles on charges of international piracy.  After three months in a Washington, D. C., jail, Semmes was released when the charges against him were dropped.  Elected as probate judge of Mobile County, he was soon forced out of office by Radical Republicans.  In 1866, he began teaching at Louisiana State Seminary, but political pressure again compelled him to resign.  He served briefly as editor of the Memphis Daily Bulletin before establishing a law practice in Mobile. He wrote The Cruise of the Alabama and Sumter.  In 1871, The Semmes House at 802 Government St. was purchased by popular subscription and presented to him. He died in 1877. The Admiral Semmes Statue was erected at the foot of Government St. in 1900.
• Croom Family
• Michael Krafft, a cotton broker from Pennsylvania, stayed awake all New Year’s Eve 1830, making noise with cowbells, hoes, and rakes. The group he led became the first parading mystic society, the Cowbellion de Rakin Society, with annual parades each New Year’s Eve.
• Joseph Stilwell Cain, a young bank runner, paraded through the streets on Mardi Gras Day 1866 while Mobile was under Union occupation, dressed in improvised costume depicting a fictional Chickasaw chief named Slacabamorinico. The choice was a backhanded insult to the Union forces in that the Chickasaw had never been defeated in war. The following year (1867), Joe was joined by other Confederate veterans parading in a decorated coal wagon, playing drums and horns, and the group became the “Lost Cause Minstrels”. This was the origin of The Order of Myths parade. Thus Joe Cain resurrected Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebration. Joe married Elizabeth Rabby and moved onto land in Bayou La Batre owned by her family. There they built a Victorian home beneath the oaks and raised six children on the estate. Joe Cain, who had played Old Slac until 1879, died in 1904 and was buried in Bayou La Batre. Julian Lee “Judy” Rayford arranged to have Joe and Elizabeth Cain reburied in Mobile’s Church Street Graveyard in 1966, and he established Joe Cain Day in 1967 by walking at the head of a jazz funeral down Government Street to the cemetery. Rayford was laid to rest beside Cain in 1980.
• Daniel E. Huger was father of The Cotton Exchange and a leading figure in Mobile’s cotton business.  His reputation derived more from his social acumen than business, as a founder of The Manassas Club and of the Gulf Hunting and Fishing Club. He was the first “Felix, Emperor of Carnival” in 1872. R.G. Dun, precursor to Dun & Bradstreet, reported that Huger was “supposed to be in receipt of a large income, but they live fast, entertain grandly and perhaps spend their earnings and more besides”  Huger died on Mardi Gras Day on 1904. – Bagwell, MBT
• Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (1853-1933). Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, she was the daughter of Murray Forbes Smith, a successful cotton merchant and plantation owner. Her parents were ruined at the outbreak of the Civil War and fled to Paris, France with their five children. When they returned to the United States after the war, her mother ran a New York City boarding house and her father brokered cotton to support their family. Her best friend from her childhood in Mobile, Consuelo Yznaga (later Viscountess Mandeville), introduced her to William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva married him. The marriage was unhappy. Alva had three children, Consuelo, William II, and Harold Vanderbilt. Fiery-tempered and ferociously ambitious, she forced her daughter Consuelo to marry the 9th Duke of Marlborough, for which the impoverished duke received more than $2.5 million (an astronomical sum in 1895). Alva divorced Vanderbilt for adultery and married Oliver H. P. Belmont in 1896. Belmont, whose father had founded an international banking fortune, had been her husband’s best friend. After her second husband’s death, Alva embraced the Suffragist movement, donating both funds and leadership. She founded the “Political Equality Association”, sponsored lectures, dances and concerts, and wrote and produced a suffrage operetta. In 1914, she joined the Congressional Union (later the National Woman’s Party). She was referred to as the “Bengal Tiger”. An amazingly profligate spender, Alva constructed and fantastically decorated more than a dozen grand residences, the most famous of which may be Marble House in Newport (which she sold in 1932 for the Depression-era price of $100,000, less than one-hundredth of the $11 million it had cost in 1892).
• John Archibald Campbell was a native of Georgia but lived as a lawyer in Mobile from 1839 until appointed a U.S. Supreme Court justice in 1853.  Campbell wrote a concurring opinion in the infamous Dred Scott case, in which the high could ruled 7-2 against a slave who tried to sue to win his freedom. The federal courthouse in Mobile was named after him. – PR 4/30/08
• Private First Class John D. New (1924-1944) was a Marine, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for falling on a grenade to save his comrades’ lives on Peleliu in 1944. A street in Langan Municipal Park is named in his honor.

Early Springhill Residents

• Albert Stein was a Prussian engineer who moved to the United States and built several municipal water systems. In 1840 the city of Mobile made a contract with Stein, who received the exclusive right to supply the city with water. He built Stein’s Reservoir on the top of Springhill. This was Mobile’s only public water system until 1886. He supervised the building of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Albert Stein died in 1874, but the water system continued to operate until 1898.
• George Tuthill, John Battle, Charles Marston, Robert Bunker, John and William Dawson

Landowners

• Major landholders near the City of Mobile in 1820 were listed as: Peter Rochon, Diego McVoy, Elipalet Beebe, Stephen LaLaude, Henry Toulmin, E. P. Gaines, Mary Rochon, Widow Chastang, Charles LaLande, Pierre Baptiste, Cornelius McCartin, Henry Francois, Barron DeFeriet, William Patterson, Martha D’Olive, John Forbes, Don Miguel Eslava, Madon DeLufser, and William Fisher.
• Kimberly-Clark bought out Scott Paper in 1997. Josuha Timberlands, formed by ex-Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers, bought 460,000 of Kimberly-Clark’s timberland in 1999.  After Worldcom went bankrupt, Joshua sold the lands mostly to private investors.
• Ennis Rainwaters, who started buying his land in western Mobile County in the early 1940s for $35 an acre, was a turpentine farmer. He owns about 10,000 acres now, according to Austin Rainwaters, his son. What accelerated Ennis’ success, however, was World War II, with its surging demand for manufacturing materials. A story about Rainwaters in the March/April 2004 issue of “Forest Landowner” magazine explained that rosin selling for $2 or $3 a barrel in 1941 shot up to more than $100 a barrel by the war’s end. Ennis plowed part of his profits into buying more timberland. Turpentine production was taken over by the paper mills, that created forms of turpentine as a by-product of the processing of pines for the paper industry. –PR 6/3/07
• Larson & McGowin, forest managers and consultants, has over 375,000 acres under its management. Larson’s grandfather, Greely McGowin, and other family members bought up land along the Alabama-Mississippi line for only $1 an acre in 1926. – PR 6/3/07
• Augustine Meaher Sr. had been described in 1956 as “a pioneer land developer in the Mobile area” in a story detailing a court order calling for “the largest single payment ever made in a land case in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Alabama.” The money was compensation for the condemnation of 188.7 acres that had been used as the site for Alabama Village, a public housing development.
  • Meaher gave the acreage for Meaher State Park to the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources in 1952, stipulating that it be used exclusively for public recreation. The park opened in 1989 and was named in honor of the senior Meaher. The Meaher family also gave $1,800 to refurbish the three-storied historic fountain that had refreshed men and horses, and place it near the Mobile Civic Center in the East Church Street Historic District.
  • In 1967, the Register reported the largest single land transaction in the history of Mobile. It was the Meahers’ sale of 7,000 acres in the city limits for an estimated $3 million. Jacintoport Corp. bought the land, a tract north of the Alabama State Docks.
  • The Meaher land is now incorporated as Chippewa Lakes LLC and marketed as Meaher Industrial Sites
• Tensaw Land and Timber, started by Frank Boykin

The Infamous

• Pirates:
  • Henry S. Neill: AKA Capt. Short. Had a bounty of $1500 placed on him by “Messrs Armstrong, Heart and Co. of Mobile.” (Huntingdon (PA) Gazette 10/24/1820, New York Evening Post)
• James Copeland and the Copeland Gang
  • James Copeland was born in Jackson County, Mississippi, in 1823.  He was the son of Isham Copeland and his wife, Rebecca Wells Copeland. He indulged in petty crimes at school and in the neighborhood of his home, until he was finally caught, stealing hogs from his neighbor, Mr. Helverson.  Despite his young age, he was prosecuted for pig stealing and arrested by the sheriff of Jackson County.  He had to give bond to appear at the Circuit Court to answer the indictment preferred against him by the State of Mississippi. His mother, who always took up for him, brought Gale H. Wages to consult, and Wages devised to destroy the courthouse, therreby destroying all evidence against James.  Wages one day made a proposition to James, to join him and the other members of his group, including McGrath, that had a Wig-Wam in the city of Mobile, where they held meetings and that they had many confederates there whom the public little suspected.  James accepted this proposition.     The clan went on stealing, robbing, killing people and burning houses in different places, until May, 1843, they came to Perry County, Mississippi, to a man by the name of Allen Brown, on Red Creek.  Brown had sold his place to a man named Harvey, who was connected with them.  Brown took a $40.00 note on the place, but Harvey refused to pay the note and Brown got Wages to take up the note and, if Harvey did not pay it to him, for Wages to kill Harvey.  Harvey killed Wages and McGrath. When Copeland came from a trip to Mobile and learned of this, he gathered a gang to try to kill Harvey.  In the attempt, a large crowd came in on them and a part of both sides were killed, including Harvey. Those of the gang who weren’t killed or captured went to Mobile, but they were caught one at a time.  Copeland loitered his time away until the spring of 1849, when he was captured and indicted in Mobile for larceny and in Perry County, Mississippi for murder.  He was tried and sentenced to four years in Alabama.  After his time was served there, he was transferred to the jail of Perry County, Mississippi.  He remained in Perry County and Covington County jails two years before his trial. – American Local History Network
• The story of Foster K. Hale Jr. and Wilie Mae Hancock, as told by Kevin Lee, Lagniappe 10/26/06.
• Bart B. Chamberlain Jr., known in local circles as “Black Bart”, enjoyed a first life as a public servant, prominent Mobile businessman and political power broker. He earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Alabama and went on to serve as an assistant solicitor, or prosecutor, in Mobile in the 1930s. A grand jury indicted him in connection with a case in which four other men were accused of luring Mobile Press Editor Henry Ewald into a bed with a man and woman and then photographing them, according to a Time magazine account in 1939. The scandal led Ewald to resign and temporarily derailed the newspaper’s moral crusade against gambling, corruption and other vices, according to the article. Chamberlain served honorably in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Afterwards he founded Citmoco Services Inc., which repaired and maintained the oil wells in the Citronelle Field, which began pumping oil in 1955. He formed another company, Citronelle-Mobile Gathering Inc., to purchase wells in the field in 1962. Along the way, he cultivated powerful friends. One of them was U.S. Sen. John Sparkman, a north Alabama Democrat whom critics accused of helping Chamberlain obtain the Commerce Department export licenses that precipitated Chamberlain’s downfall during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Chamberlain’s legal problems began when Congress capped the sale of domestic oil to the pre-embargo rate of a little more than $5 a barrel. Chamberlain, according to court records, sold about a million barrels from his Citronelle oil field to the Grand Bahamas Petroleum Corp. at about $14 per barrel in 1973 and 1974. U.S. customers then purchased the refined oil at the higher market rate. The Department of Energy contended the maneuver violated the law and opened an investigation. Chamberlain defended his actions by pointing to the export licenses he had obtained from the Commerce Department. In typically bold fashion, Chamberlain fired the first salvo in 1977, filing a federal lawsuit asking a judge to declare his actions legal. The Energy Department immediately countersued, touching off more than two decades of litigation. A U.S. District judge sided with the government in 1980. An appeals court upheld the decision two years later and sent it back to Mobile with instructions to determine damages. An appeals court determined in 1987 that Chamberlain was the “central figure” in those companies and thus was personally liable for the entire amount. The federal judge set that total at $19.4 million — $6.8 million plus $12.6 million in interest. By the end of the 1980s, the total stood at $25 million and was accumulating interest at a rate of $5,121 a day. He fled the United States in 1989 rather than pay. Chamberlain spent the rest of his life in the Swiss Alps and the Bahamas. Chamberlain made several attempts to settle the case, at one point offering to meet with government officials in the Bahamas as long as they would guarantee him safe passage back to Switzerland. The government refused, however. Instead, Alaimo appointed a receiver to take control of and sell Chamberlain’s assets in the United States. Dallas-based Merit Energy purchased his Citronelle holdings in 1997. According to a final report filed in federal court in October 2002, the government collected a total of $13.46 million from the judgment against Chamberlain. At one time, the Justice Department estimated that Chamberlain had transferred between $10 million and $15 million to Swiss bank accounts. He spoke with friends, including his former brother-in-law, the late William J. Hearin Jr., from time to time. Chamberlain and Hearin continued their friendship until Hearin died in 2001. Hearin often visited Chamberlain in Europe and the Bahamas. Lawyers from the Justice Department formally gave up trying to collect the debt in 2002, and U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo issued an order officially closing the case.  Chamberlain died in 2007 at the age of 93 in Spanish Cove in the Bahamas. – PR 5/26/07
  • Henry Ewald – Kevin Lee, Lagniappe, 10/10/07
• Mobile Whiskey Trials: Most Mobilians, including those in power, hated prohibition. Like other southern ports, Mobile had always been lax about cracking down on vice. Until World War I, a “redlight district” operated openly in the city. Gambling dens flourished. Efforts to shut down movie theaters on Sundays and to stop the local professional baseball team from playing on the Sabbath met with no success. Roman Catholics, a quarter of Mobile’s churchgoers, believed private morality was a matter for the church and parishioners, and that drinking and gambling were not major sins if done in moderation. Social activities of the city’s elite, both Protestant and Catholic, revolved around the Mobile Country Club or gentlemen’s clubs headquartered in downtown buildings, where drinks had been part of the daily fare. – Samuel L Webb, “The Great Mobile Whiskey Bar”, Alabama Heritage, Spring 2005
  • Between 1900 and World War I, Protestants in the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union fought to wipe out liquor. In the 1906, 1910, 1914, and 1918 Democratic primaries, the race for governor featured fights between those favoring statewide prohibition and those who wanted the matter left up to local communities. In each election Mobile’s citizens rejected the prohibitionist candidate by a two-to-one margin.
  • In 1907, when state legislation was seriously considering passing a prohibition bill, a delegation led by Mobile’s mayor traveled to Montgomery to try to prevent it. N.J. McDermott, president of the Bank of Mobile, wired Mobile legislators that “unless anti-prohibitionists win, please give notice that Mobile is prepared to secede from the State of Alabama.” In 1909, when “drys” tried to put prohibition in the state constitution, eighty percent of Mobile’s white citizens voted against it, the largest negative percentage of any Alabama county.
  • Prohibitionists got help from a revived Ku Klux Klan, which was so intertwined with Alabama’s Anti-Saloon League that it was impossible, said one observer, to tell “where one ended and the other began.” Mobile, with its large Catholic population and open bars, was considered a cesspool by the Klan. Prohibitionist groups and the Klan were weaker in Mobile than in other Alabama cities. Alabama prohibitionists believed Mobile was their greatest problem. Rum runners operating from Cuba and the Caribbean islands plied Gulf waters and Mobile Bay, and thousands of gallons of liquor flowed into the city.
  • U.S. DISTRICT ATTORNEY Aubrey Boyles closed down a Mobile brewery operated in open defiance of state law by the politically powerful Lyons family. The family did not forget, and in 1918 Boyles was defeated for the legislature in the Democratic primary.
  • In 1921 when prohibition agents operating out of Montgomery invaded the homes of two of Mobile’s wealthiest men. The outcry could be heard all the way to the capitol. Although Governor Thomas E. Kilby was a devout prohibitionist, Mobile public opinion forced him to condemn the raids and fire the men who conducted them. When his prohibition chief dissented, the governor sacked him as well.
  • In1923, federal grand jury indictments rocked Mobile. Among those indicted were state representative William C. “Willie” Holcombe, a former sheriff who remained in de facto control of the sheriffs office while serving in the legislature, and his brother Robert, the city’s reputed political boss. Also charged were Mobile’s police chief; the county sheriff, the chief deputy sheriff, and three other deputies; the chairman of the county Democratic party; and local attorney Percy Kearns, the reputed collection and distribution agent for liquor wholesalers. Frank Boykin, a wealthy businessman believed to be the chieftain of the local liquor trade, was also arrested. These important defendants were charged with being part of a gigantic conspiracy to violate the Volstead Act. Boykin, state representative Holcombe, and attorney Kearns were additionally charged with conspiracy to bribe. Most defendants readily surrendered to federal agents and made bond, but Mobile Police Chief Patrick O’Shaughnessy had other plans. After learning of the impending indictments, he drove to a nearby town and caught a train for New Orleans. O’Shaughnessy’s wife and family knew nothing about his little trip, but agents who arrested the chief in New Orleans believed he intended to take the first available boat to South America. The day after the federal indictments, Mobile District Attorney Bart Chamberlain arrested Aubrey Boyles, charging him with trying to illegally influence two state law enforcement agents.