It's In Alabama!

One of the places that I enjoy in Alabama is Old Cahaba. My wife,  Anne spent more than twenty years research­ing Alabama’s first per­ma­nent cap­i­tal. She has accu­mu­lated about a dozen note­books filled with his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion about this now ghost town. She spent so much time in the ceme­ter­ies that she knew most of the peo­ple by their first name. I use to tell her that all her clos­est friends were more than one hun­dred and fifty years old and in the cemetery.

We would take long walks through the town as she named the streets and who lived where, who mar­ried who, and who shot who.

She tells a story of a mys­te­ri­ous ball of light that she will write about in a few days at www.ithappenedinalabama.com.

Back to vis­it­ing Cahaba, we love to take our Ger­man Shep­herd on walks through the park. She loves water and every­where you turn in Old Cahaba there are arte­sian wells that cre­ate pools of water that fill the ditches. Then there is the Alabama River and the Cahaba River that meet. They cre­ate an inter­est­ing inter­sec­tion where the steam­boats use to come and dock to off-load food and pick up huge bales of cot­ton. Then there are inter­est­ing sto­ries about the Civil War Prison, Cas­tle Mor­gan as well as sto­ries about  the slaves that lived in Cahaba  and some­times ran away.

You might want to read her book enti­tled: Dream Ghost by Anne Chancey Dal­ton. It is an his­tor­i­cal novel about a twelve year old boy who comes by steam­boat each sum­mer to stay with his uncle the news­pa­per edi­tor.  He has a dream and sees two men steal­ing a trunk. He awakes the next morn­ing and hears the sher­iff talk­ing about some­one break­ing into the drug­store and steal­ing a trunk. He becomes very inter­ested in solv­ing the crime and in fact wants to be a Pri­vate Eye like Allan Pinker­ton was.

Mixed in with the story are his­tor­i­cally accu­rate facts of Old Cahaba. A fun way to learn his­tory.
Click on the book if you want to know more or want to pur­chase Dream Ghost.