between the magnolias

Laughing Stock: The Autobiography of T.S. Stribling.

T. S. Stribling (1881-1965) was a restless man. It takes a certain thick restlessness to make like a bum and travel across the country hopping from train to train relying on the spruce of the moment to send the manna from the heaven you hardly believe. And it takes a certain stubborness to write about the South while maintaining your political and economic distance from it. 

Though he followed the path deemed proper by earning a law degree at the University of Alabama in 1905, he might as well have worked at Wendy's. His autobiography, Laughing Stock, recounts the pleasure of a life as lived by a man who intended nothing greater than to experience and write. In his own words:

My idea of an autobiography is that it should tell precisely what one remembers about oneself and nothing more. Hearsay evidence, logically, should be ruled out of autobiographies just as it is ruled out of murder trials, because if you have to inquire about yourself, that phase of your life forms no part of your conscious existence and should be omitted. I intend to follow this rule strictly. 

And then, he cleverly continues:

For example, I cannot remember my birth so I do not feel at liberty to put down the amazing and completely justified portents that accompanied my entrance into a waiting world. I will not tell how, when I was born in Clifton, Tennessee, a neighbor girl asked my mother what object she should first place in my hand. That was important, because the first thing a baby touches, it will work with all the rest of its life. My mother didn't know what to put in my hand, but she said the Bible. The neighbor girl, however, in glancing around the bedroom, could not find the Bible but saw a pen. So she put the pen into my hand, and that fact has always colored my output of fiction. Then, as a kind of great seal assuring the fulfillment of the prophecy, this neighbor girl, later in life, went crazy.

He has a way with words, this man. And a way with life that makes you wish you could see how he eats a freshly-roasted pig (so much can be known about someone by how they eat pork). 

• Bio from UNA page.
• The Store, published in 1932, won a Pulitzer Prize. 
• You can read Birthright and The Cruise of the Dry Dock for free online courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
• Memories and tributes to Stribling from his hometown of Florence, Alabama.
• The TS Stribling Museum in Tennessee was restored by the Tennessee Historical Foundation, through a grant from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). A 1924 Craftsman Bungalow style house built by T.L. Kloss, a local business man, and later the retirement home of 1933 Pulitzer Prize winner and author, T.S.Stribling, a Clifton native. Stribling married Lou Ella Kloss, the builder's daughter. The restored house is now the T.S. Stribling Museum and houses the Clifton Public Library. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is located in the historic district of Clifton, TN. The site is open Tuesday-Friday, 11:30-6:30pm. Guided tours can be arranged by contacting: Wanda Johnston Email: [email protected] Tel: (931) 676-3188
• "T. S. Stribling", a handy printable bio with images from Maria Pietuszka. 
• Drive the Tennessee River Trail Scenic Byway and visit Stribling's house along the way.
• Explore Wayne Country driving map is a great, easy printable go-to.
• Books by and about Senor Stribling.

The mystery of Brownville, Alabama.

Chuck Lett describes what remains of Brownville, which is located a little north west of Northport and accessible from highways 82 and 171. Now a ghost of its former self, Brownville was once a rather sizeable company town. Currently, only three of more than 40 modest wood frame dwellings that provided homes for some 250 people are inhabited. 

A group school picture from Brownville

The Boys of Woodcraft group in Brownville.

Brownville began in 1925, when W. P. Brown started a wood preserving plant in what was then Red Valley. With the building of the plant, which has produced millions of creosote utility poles, the community began to grow and grow and grow. It became a boom town in the late 1920's and the company built white and colored schools and community buildings and helped operate them for the Brownville residents and their children.

Sipsey logs from the swamp in Brownville.

Reporter Robert DeWitt describes nostalgic memories of its early inhabitants:

It didn't take a holiday to bring the community together. Woodmen of the World, a fraternal organization, had fish fries and invited the community. Baseball went on all summer long. And folks would gather just to jaw. But it was the children who kept the busiest social calendar.
Sue Miller remembers candy-making parties, "tacky" parties (where kids wore their worst clothes), weenie roasts, cake walks and games of spin the bottle.

Courting couples could go to the movies on Saturday night in the community building. Afterwards, they walked the quiet streets.
Not everybody had a radio. Those who did shared with their neighbors. As daylight faded on Saturdays, people gathered on their porches and radios tuned to the Grand Ole Opry.

Aubrey Lake describes the process involved in creating and shipping the special wood poles and fence pieces in Brownville around 1961. By 1965, reporter Delbert Reed found the town diminished:

The town was much larger then, than it is today, since modern machinery has reduced the number of workers at the plant, which still operates at least two shifts per day, five days per week, with 100 employees.

Within a few years of the Brown business' end, loblolly pine trees, Japanese honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, Kudzu (of course), and a small army of weeds and grasses promptly moved in. They have claimed all the remaining deserted houses.

A 53-inch annual rainfall, average for the area, aids in the slow  natural decay of Brownville. Soon nothing will remain of a once-thriving town except for the three occupied houses. There is, of course, the busy lumber treatment plant off to the side, an unconcerned witness, going about its business under new ownership.

While Brownville lived, its community life reflected the fortunes of the Brown Wood Preserving Plant. Its pressure treated poles and lumber were used throughout the country for utility lines, barn construction and fence posts.
Today the plant employs only a fraction of the labor force it once required. All but four of the employees commute. Even so, production is actually up, officials say, due to new methods.

These new methods, however, triggered the death of the town. In 1923 J. Graham Brown, an entrepreneur from Kentucky , and his brother bought several thousand acres of timberland and built a preserving plant on the site. The remote location meant that housing had to be provided to accommodate employees and their families. More than forty modest frame residences were constructed along dirt roads laid out in the wooded area near the Brown's plant. For the use of these homes, families paid $1 per room each month.
Built in the mid to late 20s, the homes were without indoor plumbing. But they housed a largely contented and productive population.

The Browns, who owned extensive timber interests in several southern states, established a railroad, which they playfully named using the initials of the brother's first names: the M and G line. It served a steam skidder and log train connecting Brownville and Buhl, some twelve miles away.

In 2008 the Brown Wood Preserving Company, Inc. invested in a significant expansion at the Kennedy, AL CCA treating plant. Contiguous property was acquired and the Brownville treating plant was shut down and consolidated into the new facility. Today the company is being lead by Mr. Stanley’s son David S. Stanley and has the most modern and efficient plant facilities available. They still specialize in treated wood poles.

• Join the Brownville Facebook Group where you can find photos and relatives of the Brownville worker families.
• Explore the lovely Brownville tribute page, which pays historical respects to the mystery of Brownville.
• Cemeteries near Brownville.
• A Brownville neighborhood map. 
• Another old Brownville map.
• Photo of the company store in Brownville.

Yellow Creek at Lake Nichol.

Photo taken by Randy Waite.

A waterfall on Canyon Lake in Cottondale.

Taken by Randy Waite.

The spillway in Tuscaloosa.

The spillway at Lake Tuscaloosa on a very foggy morning.

Taken by Steve Driskell.

Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Alabama folk art.

Jimmy Lee Sudduth was one of a group of artists whose creativity expanded the boundaries of what was once considered mainstream art in the twentieth century. These artists, now usually categorized as self-taught, have attracted an enthusiastic audience of collectors and admirers who appreciate the strength and heartfelt sincerity of their productions. Both the artists and collectors are passionate advocates of basic human values and emotions, expressed in an astounding array of media and subject matter. Work like Sudduth’s was once considered merely odd or eccentric; now it is cherished for its originality, its joyous spirit, and its evocation of ways of life in the rural South. Sudduth was born in 1910 in Caines Ridge, a small community near Fayette. His mother, Balzola, was a medicine woman of Native American descent who used wild plants in her curative preparations. While accompanying his mother in the woods one day, the young boy created his first painting in mud on a tree stump. This painting survived until their next visit, and Sudduth’s mother believed this was a sign he should continue to paint. He did so, but his art remained an avocation for many years until he had more time to pursue it later in life. In Fayette, Sudduth worked at a gristmill  and, later, at Brown’s Lumber Mill. He eventually became “everybody’s yard man,” painting in the evenings. Perhaps the most important influence on his evolving artistic career was Jack Black, a neighbor and the publisher of the local newspaper. Black, who was also the founder of the Fayette Art Museum, encouraged his friend to continue to paint and sought out recognition for his work. He helped to arrange Sudduth’s first exhibition at the Stillman College art department in 1969. In 1976 Sudduth was featured at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife. A one-person exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art followed in 1978, and the artist made an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show in 1980. Thereafter, Sudduth’s work received increasing exposure and market presence. Over the years, he has been included in almost fifty exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Sudduth’s own interests, rather than the marketplace, clearly inspired his art. In 1963 Robert Martin, a young reporter for the Florence Times Tri-City Daily, interviewed the artist, who recalled his artistic beginnings. “I started when I was eight, just drawing on the ground,” he said. “Later on though, I began to draw on paper.” He told the reporter he had never had any training in art, “except what I’ve learned myself in the experience.”  (1) Sudduth’s favored medium was something he calls “sweet mud,” a combination of clays he dug from the surrounding area mixed with a sugary substance as a binder and sometimes incorporating commercial paint. Over the years, he manipulated his simple materials in a variety of ways. He applied them with his fingers, sticks, brushes, and other implements. For some works, he drew with soft pieces of clay to produce a soft, pastellike finish, while others were built up with heavily applied coatings of mud. He employed plant materials as stains, and charred the surfaces of boards, resulting in a rich, silky, deep black finish. Seemingly his ingenuity was endless—dissatisfied with the blacks achieved by other methods, he reportedly used lawnmower exhaust to smoke a passage to the desired tone. The artist’s subject matter was complex and wide-ranging: from people, animals, and situations familiar to residents of western Alabama, to the larger world he experienced mostly through the popular media. Throughout his career, he portrayed wildlife such as squirrels, turtles, and snakes, along with a series of dogs he has owned as pets, collectively known as “Toto.” He also made many portraits, obviously reveling in the diversity of his sitters’ presentation and dress. An enthusiastic man with a positive outlook, Sudduth conveyed his fascination with the people he portrayed through spontaneous, gestural depictions of their features, hair, and clothing. Like his clay medium, Sudduth was part and parcel of his native state. “I’m easy to find,” he once said. “I’m in the center of the universe.” (2) In this case, the universe was centered in the town of Fayette in western Alabama. Sudduth gained a reputation by showing his work first in local festivals, and later in national exhibitions. For many years, he was a primary attraction at the annual Kentuck Festival in Northport, near Tuscaloosa. His admirers lined up by the dozen to purchase whatever the artist had brought to sell, and he routinely ran out of work before he ran out of buyers. Sudduth died in 2007 at the age of 97. 

(Source: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts)

Rock and roll in Birmingham.

This summer, the Birmingham Museum of Art presents Who Shot Rock & Roll, the first major museum exhibition on rock & roll to put photographers in the foreground, acknowledging their creative and collaborative role in the history of rock music.

From its earliest days, rock & roll was captured in photographs that personalized, and frequently eroticized, the musicians, creating a visual identity for the music. The photographers were handmaidens to the rock & roll revolution, and their images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock has fostered since the 1950s.

The exhibition is in six sections: rare and revealing images taken behind the scenes; snapshots of young musicians at the beginnings of their careers; exhilarating photographs of live performances that display the energy, passion, style, and sex appeal of the musicians on stage; powerful images of the crowds and fans that are often evocative of history paintings; portraits revealing the soul and creativity, rather than the surface and celebrity, of the musicians; and conceptual images and album covers highlighting the collaborative efforts between the image makers and the musicians.

Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Gail Buckland.

General admission to the exhibit is $10 a head, not much considering all the goosebumps you'll accrue as you view.

FIRST THURSDAYS ROCKUMENTARY SERIES AUGUST 4 and SEPTEMBER 1 // FREE

The Museum is partnering with the experts at Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival to bring you a series of the "baddest rock-and-roll documentaries ever produced". Not bad.

Alabama love.

PoppyandPinecone's "Alabama Love" for sale on etsy.

Marietta Johnson's educational entrepreneurship in Alabama.

 

In 1907, Marietta Pierce Johnson (1864-1938) founded the School of Organic Education in Fairhope, as an experiment to study child development and provide children with the appropriate conditions for optimal development. Established within the Fairhope Single-Tax Colony, the school continues to operate in the community of Fairhope, and the original school is now a museum.

Marietta Pierce was born outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 8, 1864, into the farming family where she was one of eight children. As a young woman, she studied education at the Third State Normal School (now St. Cloud State University) in Minnesota and then taught in elementary and secondary schools in that state.

Marietta Pierce married John Franklin Johnson. They lived together in Minnesota before moving to Montana where they worked as ranchers. Learning of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony and its utopian community in Gulf Coast Alabama, the couple moved to Fairhope in 1901. Johnson taught in the Fairhope public school for a year before following her husband to Mississippi to run a pecan orchard. After its failure, the couple moved back to Fairhope, and Johnson took charge of the Fairhope Public School, overseeing its first high school graduating class in 1903.

One of the early pioneers of progressive education, Johnson studied the theories of child development promoted by pediatrician Nathaniel Oppenheim in his book, The Development of the Child (1898), as well as the social criticism of Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and the educational theories of education reformers Friedrich Froebel and John Dewey. Through a blending and expansion of their work, she developed her unique philosophy of education.

In 1907, Fairhope resident Lydia Comings urged Marietta Johnson to found a school based on her philosophy. With Johnson's two sons and four other students, she established her experimental Organic School of Education school in a small cottage on Church Street in downtown Fairhope. Having studied Oppenheim's theories of child development, Johnson's vision included the idea that the school's curricula should be structured and progress according to his concept of the stages of biological and neurological child development. She believed that the interests of children should be respected so that they could develop the power to think for themselves. Her concept of instruction, which she called organic education because it focused on the child as a complete "organism," was a drastic departure from the traditional teaching methods of the day, which viewed adults as all-knowing and children as miniature, but incomplete, adults. In Johnson's organic model, teachers were charged with presenting academic subjects in a natural setting that did not pressure children to conform to a rigid or regimented schedule. Students proceeded at their own individual and comfortable pace.

According to Johnson, childhood should be viewed as its own stage and not merely preparation for adulthood. Basic to the concept of organic education is the assumption that children are born to learn, that they want to learn, and that it is the job of educators to facilitate this by being aware of each child's progression through the stages of development. She also believed that external standards tended to foster self-consciousness and thus the school had no tests or grades. Each child was simply expected to attend class and put forth his or her very best effort. She believed that the order of development of the child's nervous system must not be violated and therefore all formal work such as reading, writing, and use of figures was postponed until age eight or nine. Classes were small and a sense of cooperation rather than competition prevailed.

Johnson was a proponent of a unique philosophy of progressive education inspired by her contemporary Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessorri. She did not believe any child should be allowed to fail.

The non-profit Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education celebrated its 100th year of continuous operation in 2007. It is located on a four-acre campus off of Pecan Avenue in Fairhope and continues to operate according to its founder's ideals. The school offers instruction for children in kindergarten through eighth grade with a Learning Center for home-schooled high school students. The Marietta Johnson Museum is located in the original school house at 10 South School Street in Fairhope.

Full moon names and their meanings.

Trying to hunt down the meaning of a "sugar moon" was like pulling metal teeth. But I learned a bit about moon names in the process. Here is what The Farmer's Almanac has to say about full moon names and their meanings:

Full Moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full Moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. There was some variation in the Moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior. European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on the average, the full Moon dates shift from year to year. Here is the Farmers Almanac’s list of the full Moon names.

• Full Wolf Moon – January Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.
• Full Snow Moon – February Since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month, native tribes of the north and east most often called February’s full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult.
• Full Worm Moon – March As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.
• Full Pink Moon – April This name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
• Full Flower Moon – May In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
• Full Strawberry Moon – June This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. However, in Europe they called it the Rose Moon. Also because the relatively short season for harvesting strawberries comes each year during the month of June . . . so the full Moon that occurs during that month was christened for the strawberry!
• The Full Buck Moon – July July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
• Full Sturgeon Moon – August The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.
• Full Corn Moon – September This full moon’s name is attributed to Native Americans because it marked when corn was supposed to be harvested. Most often, the September full moon is actually the Harvest Moon.
• Full Harvest Moon – October This is the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. In two years out of three, the Harvest Moon comes in September, but in some years it occurs in October. At the peak of harvest, farmers can work late into the night by the light of this Moon. Usually the full Moon rises an average of 50 minutes later each night, but for the few nights around the Harvest Moon, the Moon seems to rise at nearly the same time each night: just 25 to 30 minutes later across the U.S., and only 10 to 20 minutes later for much of Canada and Europe. Corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice the chief Indian staples are now ready for gathering.
• Full Beaver Moon – November This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.
• The Full Cold Moon; or the Full Long Nights Moon – December During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.