Day 30 - Mobile, Alabama, to Bonifay, Florida

Well, we thought we might make it to Tallahassee this afternoon, but as fate would have it, we didn't get out of Mobile, Alabama, this morning until nearly lunch time. Just happened that we were looking over the materials given to us by our camp hosts yesterday afternoon and we caught sight of a couple of gems we just had to visit before leaving town.

The first gem was historic Fort Conde that had been established by the French way, way back in 1702. You may remember from your history classes that it was the French who founded that part of the new world known as La Louisiane, including that portion of the gulf coast that contains Mobile. In those days the outpost was known as Fort Louis de la Louisane. Later it would be moved and renamed Fort Louis de Mobile.

After the original wooden fort had deteriorated too much, a more permanent masonry enclosure was constructed between 1723 and 1735 and christened Fort Conde. The sole purpose of the fort at the time was to defend against both the Spanish and the British.

Thanks to the French being on the losing side of the French & Indian War, Fort Conde and the surround territory that contained Mobile became British property and the fort was renamed Fort Charlotte. The Brits were in control from 1763 until 1780

In 1780 the the Spanish, seeing that the British had other matters on their minds (like a colonial revolution), laid siege to Fort Charlotte and succeeded in acquiring the Fort and the surrounding territories that included Mobile. They left the name of the fort as Charlotte, but pronounced it Carlota. Clever those Spaniards!

In 1813, the Spanish handed over the Fort to the Americans. At that time, Mobile and the Fort became part of the Mississippi Territory until Alabama became a state in 1819. The nearly 100 year-old-fort was demolished in the 1820s to make way for urban development (Darn those developers!). But in 1976, as part of Mobile's celebration of the Bicentennial, digging was conducted on the site and a rough idea of where things had been constructed came to light. After the city obtained copies of the original French plans for the fort, a 4/5 sized replica was constructed on the site, which is what we see today.

So, having learned all that, you can see why we just couldn't pass up the opportunity to see the spot where the fortunes of four international powers collided in centuries past. Even though we'd only been on the road for a half dozen miles since leaving camp, we pulled right off of Interstate 10 and into the Fort's parking lot. And that's where we remained for the next several hours.

The Fort museum was extremely interesting and cleverly laid out. As Concetta said to me as we strolled through the rooms inside the masonry walls, she never realized that there was so much history in the gulf coast states. But it all has to do, I told her, with how long humans have been coming here. The Spanish first came ashore in Florida 500 years ago. Around Mobile it was 300 years ago. That's quite a jump on Nevada's history where we're from. For that reason, it's really hard driving down the interstate and passing a point of interest sign every five miles. They all sound so interesting it's very hard to pass them by.

But the Fort wasn't all there was to see in Mobile, there was a three story "City of Mobile" museum right across the street. Good heavens, could it possibly be so? Let's just say that the Mobile City Museum was one of the finest we've seen on this sojourn of ours, and every single display was wonderful. The whole museum glistened like a new penny, from top to bottom and in every corner including the rest rooms. The museum's displays ran the gamut all the way from Native American to modern day, and they successfully hit every period in between.

I had several favorites. In the Native American gallery they had on display an dugout canoe that tipped the scales at 700 years old. The craft had been constructed from a single cypress log and the building techniques were just what we all learned in the third grade: they built fires on the log and then hand scrapped away the burned parts -- over and over again -- until they had hollowed out the log top to bottom. The walls of the canoe were perhaps an inch think, perhaps less. Pretty exacting for primitive scraping tools and fire (photo right).

I also liked the individual room devoted to the Confederate raider, CSS Alabama. The Alabama served as a successful commerce raider, attacking Union merchant and naval ships over the course of her two-year career, during which she never anchored in a Southern port. She was sunk in battle by the USS Kearsarge in June 1864 at the Battle of Cherbourg outside the port of Cherbourg, France. The Alabama, and ships like her, was important because she was a blockade runner. The southern Confederacy was starved for equipment and supplies during the Civil War and depending heavily on blockade runners to get past the Union ships that had bottled up the various ports in the south. It's been about 50 years since I read a book on the subject, but I do know it's a fascinating story. The photo at left is part of the display of CSS Alabama memorabilia.