Biographies and influential residents.
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…
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 early 1889, Florence postmaster Bessie McAlester traveled all the way to Indianapolis with a rather unusual mission: convince President-elect Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, to let her, a Democrat, keep her job. And according to the newspapers, she wasn’t shy…
The story of John A. Murrell is one of those pieces of Southern history where fact, folklore, and outright sensationalism have become so tangled together that separating one from another is nearly impossible. Known in later accounts as the “Great…
When William Basil Wood died in Florence on April 3, 1891, the Florence Times struggled to summarize the life of a man who had been involved in nearly every major phase of the city’s development. The newspaper wrote: “A full…
Crosby-Lambert House A color rendering of the Crosby-Lambert House. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1958 at a proposed cost of $35,000. Though construction never began, the house was destined for Colbert County, Alabama. A single-story, flat-roofed one-bedroom residence of…
Studying an 1837 map of Florence, Alabama we noticed, along what is now West Irvine, a large plot of land owned by an unknown person named C.S. Tarpley, Esq. Unknown, because it isn’t a name that we recognized from that…
Born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Helen Keller became one of the most recognized figures in American history. Her childhood home, Ivy Green, was where teacher Anne Sullivan helped Keller make her famous breakthrough in communication. Keller later…
By 1829, the Cherokee Nation in the Southeast was under enormous pressure. Georgia was pushing to extend its authority over Cherokee lands, white settlers were moving into disputed territory, and the federal government was moving steadily toward a policy of…