Sumter County, Alabama, Railroads

Topic: Early Versions
The Selma, Alabama, naval yard, which was destroyed by Union troops in 1865, [1] used steel from the Elyton, Alabama, area.  After the Civil War, outside investors acquired control of an 1853 charter for a railroad from Meridian, Mississippi, to Elyton.  It had reached York Station in Sumpter County, Alabama, in 1860, and was leased to the Selma and Meridian Railroad during the war. [2]

The Selma and Meridian is the red line numbered 168 going east from York through McDowell.  The initial line to Meridian is the segment from York to Cuba.  The unbuilt line is the red line numbered 168 going northeast from York to Eutaw.  It was merged into the Alabama and Chattanooga in November 1868 after Republicans won the elections. [3]

The line was completed in May 1871, and, in June, Elyton was renamed Birmingham. [4]  An Englishman, who rode from Meridian to Eutaw in January 1871, heard construction had created a shortage of Freedmen [5] willing to grow cotton.  One imagines that, once recruited, the men moved to the next section when the one in Sumter County was completed.

The two railroads attracted the attention of the Ku Klux Klan who objected to them hiring Freedmen as firemen.  John Taylor Coleman told Congressional investigators on 18 October 1871 that he had heard “from others—from the baggage-master and the train hands.  They said it was a common thing to take a negro fireman off and whip him, and threatened the engineer that if he brought him back again over there he might look out for similar treatment.” [6]

Sumter County gained little from the rail lines crossing it.  Robert Spratt said the Livingston Episcopal church lost members “when the mineral region of North Alabama began to develop.” [7]  Livingston didn’t build a cotton warehouse near the depot until 1886.  [8]

Conservatives were successful in creating barriers against alien influences.  When new ideas did arrive, they came from the rail center in Meridian in neighboring Lauderdale County.

The Southern Railroad expanded its reach to Cincinnati in 1891. [9]  This opened new markets for produce.

Morgan Lynn experimented with beans in 1890 near Cuba Station.  His success led to a migration of new farmers to the area.  Jack Vaughan said they included Rainers. [10

John George Riner had migrated to Rossner through South Carolina from Württemberg. [11]  While several of his children relocated to Lauderdale County before the Civil War, [12] one went to the larger city of Selma. [13]  It was children of the latter who moved to Cuba. [14]

Cuba’s population nearly doubled between 1900 and 1910 [15] when Floyd McElroy opened a factory that produced crates for cabbages and hampers for beans and peas. [16]  The Holmon Strawberry farm shipped to Cincinnati.  It hired 300 to 400 African Americans to pick the fruit, and used Black women to sort and pack the fruit. [17]

Blacks were temporary seasonal help, not tenants or sharecroppers who were provided with homes.  Wage earners were expected to leave when the work war over.  Rich Amerson, who was born near Sumterville and settled west of Livingston, picked fruit. [18]

It was during these temporary periods when individuals were assembled from different parts of the county mixed that new songs like “Come by Here,” if they were sung, were spread.

The strawberry harvest was the consequence of another industry that developed with the railroads: logging.  Nelle Jenkins said that, in the early years around Ramsey Station, “after the forests were cleared and the cane cut. strawberries sprang up around the edge of the forests.” [19]

The forests grew on acidic soils, not the limey ones near the river that had supported large cotton plantations.  These were the ones to fail first, [20] prompting people to abandon them and move west, first to Mississippi, then to Texas.  The war contributed to the reversion of the land to wilderness. [21]

Evan Allison opened a sawmill between York and Livingston, [22] which he sold to the Alexander Land Company in 1899. [23]  John Alexander had retail lumber yards in Chicago.  His partner, George Cooley Hixon, was the son of a Wisconsin lumberman. [24]  They ran the company as Sumter Lumber until 1912, [25] when they moved to Mississippi leaving behind stumps on clear-cut land. [26]

Allison began a new logging operation in 1900 near Lilita. [27]  In 1902, [28] he recapitalized with money from Frederick Richardson of Alpena, Michigan. [29]  In 1905, Allison moved his operations to Bellamy 1905 on a railroad he constructed (number 169 on the map). [30]

Earl M. McGowin remembered Allison “employed only black help with the exception of a few key personnel.” [31] The company housing was segregated, but Hillard White remembered “the houses were painted red and green in the Negro neighborhoods.” [32]

Over time, differences increased as white housing was improved and more houses were built for Blacks.  In 1969, only eight homes rented to African Americans had bathrooms and running water. [33]

Allison opened a new logging camp in Whitfield in the late 1920s.  Locals described the houses as “the old boxcar dwelling.” [34]  In the late 1960s, James Williams observed “Whitefield gives the impression of houses being put down in the woods and left to decay by themselves.” [35]

If one were looking for a place where new secular music could enter the county, it would be the more isolated environments like Whitfield.  In the late 1930s, Amerson told Ruby Pickens Tartt:

“Oh, yes, I left out of there after my uncle died, it was so lonesome like, and I went ramblin. That’s how come I’s down here.  Been at the sawmill.  First I was totin water for the swampers, then pullin lumber off a dry chain.  Then workin on the pond gettin logs out, hookin ’em with a chain, sendin ’em up in the mills.  Put ’em in the water to keep the worms out.  Then I was on the lumber hog.  Pull a lever this way and the saw squared the lumber.  Next I was stackin lumber, then I was the millwright. [36]

His repertoire included blues. [37]

The railroad remained the province of white men.  A 1930 photograph of the Alabama, Tennessee and Northern crew taken in Bellamy showed a line of white men standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the tracks.  All were wearing hats.  At the left side, a group of eleven men with dark faces are standing or squatting, with a slight space separating them from the whites.  They were wearing caps or high brimmed hats.  [38]

That railroad was built to Panola from the north in 1902, where it built a roundhouse and shops. [39]  The line, numbered 9 on the map, passed through Geiger in 1909, [40] reached Emelle in 1910, [41] and moved south through York in 1911, [42] where it constructed an engine and repair shop in 1913. [43]

Jimmie Rodgers’ paternal grandparents lived in Geiger, where he spent time as a child.  By age ten, he was living in Meridian, [44] where he developed the blue yodels that made him the first dominant country music singer in 1928.  Musical innovation, like everything else, happened just beyond the Sumter County’s lines.

Graphics
Selection from “Alabama.”  Hammond’s Illustrated Library World Atlas.  New York: C. S. Hammond and Company, 1948.  49.

End Notes
1.  Wilson’s raid and Forest’s response were discussed in the post for 30 August 2020.
2.  Wikipedia.  “Alabama Great Southern Railroad.”
3.  Wikipedia, Great Southern.

4.  Herbert J. Lewis.  “Birmingham.”  Encyclopedia of Alabama website.  8 January 2008; last updated 3 April 2017.

5.  Robert Somers.  The Southern States Since the War.  London: Macmillan and Company, 1871.  159.  This was brought to my attention by Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  732.

6.  John Taylor Coleman.  Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama.  18 October 1871.  United States Congress.  Joint Select Committee.  The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States.  Alabama.  Volume II.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872.  1053.

He got a threat that said “our Grand Cyclops has just arrived.”  A probate judge in Hale County, north of Marengo County, said “on the Selma and Meridian railroad” the Klan had “absolutely gone so far as to forbid the company from employing negro firemen on the line of the road at all.” [45]

7.  Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.  23.

8.  Spratt.  91.
9.  Wikipedia, Great Southern.

10.  Jack Vaughan.  “History of Cuba.”  26–28 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.  28.

11.  David Sprinkle.  “John George ‘Riner’ Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  20 December 2010.

12.  David Sprinkle.  “Charles Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  29 December 2011.

13.  David Sprinkle.  “Judge Thomas Gilbert Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  11 December 2011.

14.  Vernon McElroy.  “George Norris Rainer.”  Find a Grave website.  17 July 2001; updated by David Snow.

Vernon McElroy.  “Myra Elizabeth Rainer Vaughan.”  Find a Grave website.  6 September 2001; updated by David Snow.

15.  Wikipedia.  “Cuba, Alabama.”  United States census for 1900 reported 384; in 1910 the population had increased to 650.

16.  Alan Brown.  Sumter County.  Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.  113.

17.  Alan Brown.  117.

18.  Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  154.

19.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  127.  Ramsey Station was close to Emelle, and was displaced by it when the railroad reached Emelle and its merchants transferred to the rail town.

20.  G. A. Swenson, et alia.  Soil Survey of Sumter County, Alabama.  Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, May 1941.  

21.  Somers.  159.  He noted in 1871 that much of the cotton bottom lands were fallow and added “when the hand of man ceases to till and dress it, the strong and untamed soil begins to work and wanton in its own way, and is now sending up over large tracts a wild herbage, and, where ditches and watercourses have not been kept clear as formerly, displays a tendency to develop little germs of swamp.”

22.  Hillard White, Ollie Coleman, Edward Hardrick, Gabriel Jenkins, and Eunice White.  “If Bellamy Had a Memory.  24 in Heritage.

23. Jud K. Arrington.  “History of Railroad in Sumter County.”  In Thomas Lawson, Jr.  Logging Railroads of Alabama.  Birmingham, Alabama: Cabbage Stack Publishing, 1996.  Adapted by Charles Walker.  “Allison and Smith.”  131 in Heritage.

24.  “George Cooley Hixon.”  Yale University.  Obituary Record of Graduates Deceased During the Year Ending July 1, 1923.  New Haven: Yale University, 1923.  782.  Steve McDonald posted the names of the principals in a 4 September 2004 post on Forestry Forum website.

25.  White.  24.

26.  Gil Hoffman.  “Sumter Lumber Co.”  Mississippi Railroads website.

Gene Allred.  “Electric Mills, MS.”  Mississippi Gen Web website.

27.  Charles Walker.  “Sumter & Choctaw Railroad.”  139–140 in Heritage.  139.
28.  Gil Hoffman.  “Allison Lumber Co.”  Mississippi Rails website.

29.  Item about Allison Lumber Company.  Southern Lumberman.  2 August 1924.  Synopsis published as “ Historic Archives: Allison Lumber Co.”  Southern Loggin’ Times.  January 2014. Richardson got his early experience in a logging camp owned by his uncle Charles Richardson, [46] who was in business with Newell Avery in Bay City. [47]  Allison was still majority owner when he died in 1937. [48]  His son-in-law, Allen E. Grubbs, took over. [49]

30.  Walker, Sumter and Choctaw.”  139.

31.  Earl M. McGowin.  Interviewed by Elwood R. Maunder for Forest History Society on 17 March 1976.  Society’s website.

32.  White.  24.

33.  James D Williams.  “Bellamy Alabama: Company Town Revisited.”  Civil Rights Digest 2:12–19:Fall 1969.  14.

34.  White.  24.
35.  Williams.  16.

36.  Richard Amerson.  “Richard the Tall-Hearted.  Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt.  107–111 in Brown and Owens.  110.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [50]

37.  Brown and Owens.  155.  Amerson subsequently was recorded by John Lomax and Harold Courlander.

38.  Alan Brown.  106–107.

39.  Cecile Oliver Horton.  “History of Panola and Surrounding Communities.  34–36 in Heritage.

40.  Bill Gilbert.  “Geiger.”  Collected by Jud K. Arrington.  Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  32–33 in Heritage.  32.

41.  Charles Walker.  “Alabama, Tennessee, & Northern Railroad.”  132–133 in Heritage.  132.

42.  “New Railroad Reaches York.”  The York [Alabama] Weekly Press.  9 March 1911.
43.  Walker, Alabama, Tennessee.  132.
44.  Alan Brown.  33.

45.  William T. Blackford.  Testimony, Demopolis, Alabama.  24 October 1871.  Alabama.  1293.

46.  Perry Francis Powers.  A History of Northern Michigan and Its People.  Assisted by H.G. Cutler.  Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1912.  2:924–927.

47.  Clara A. Avery.  The Averell-Averill-Avery Family: A Record of the Descendants of William and Abigail Averell of Ipswich, Mass.  Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Evangelical Publishing House, 1914.  Reprinted by Higginson Book Company, Salem.  2:666  Avery and I share the same immigrant ancestor, but the lines diverged around the time of the Salem witch trials in the 1690s.

48.  Tilda Mims.  “Evan Frank Allison: Pioneer in Conservation.”  Alabama’s Forests 22:28–30: Summer 2003.  29.

49.  Obituary.  Added by Paul RouLaine on 12 September 2015 to David McCarley.  “Evan Frank Allison.”  Find a Grave website.  20 April 2013.

50.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.