In the early 1900s, professional baseball was becoming America’s national pastime, and one family in Tuscumbia, Alabama, was particularly enthusiastic about the game. George and Catherine Manush raised eight children (seven sons and one daughter) in their home at 1005…
In January 1917, an elderly African American woman named Elvira Shoals sat on the porch of her small Oklahoma home and recalled a life that had begun nearly a century earlier near Tuscumbia, Alabama. Born into slavery around 1817, Elvira…
On June 21, 1838, a Cherokee man known as Chicken was killed after jumping from a moving railroad car about a mile outside Tuscumbia, Alabama. He was among hundreds of Cherokee being transported west during the forced removal now remembered…
Among the businesses that took advantage of the power in the flowing waters of Spring Creek was a substantial flour and feed mill operated for decades by the Hindman family. The business began with Samuel Hindman, a millwright who came…
In April 1863, Tuscumbia became part of a major Union operation during the Civil War. An old engraving captioned “Tuscumbia, Ala., One of the Scenes of Colonel Grierson’s Exploits” makes it sound as though Colonel Benjamin Grierson rode through town.…
About five miles west of Florence, along Gunwaleford Road, stood the John Peters Plantation, a sprawling agricultural estate covering approximately 6,620 acres. By 1860, it had become one of the largest slaveholding operations in Lauderdale County, with 313 enslaved people…
In 1940, Florence hosted a wrestling spectacle that probably sounded unbelievable even by the standards of professional wrestling. At Fort Willingham Armory, spectators gathered for a “Rassle Royale” featuring a man billed at an astonishing 640 pounds. His name was…
Barton Agricultural Works traced its beginning to 1881. By the early twentieth century, its stationery proudly advertised the company as the manufacturer of “The Celebrated Barton Cultivators.” But the story may actually begin a few years earlier. On September 24,…
Long before downtown Florence became the center of business activity that we know today, much of the commerce of the young town took place below the bluff, along the Tennessee River. And it wasn’t limited to the Florence side. During…
On an early March morning in 1854, a violent tornado struck the Tennessee River at Florence, tearing apart one of the city’s most important pieces of infrastructure and devastating the warehouses clustered around the river landing. The 1854 Florence, Alabama…