"Helen Keller and the Little Library that Could" by Emily McMackin Dye

E I G H T D OLL A R S

NUMBER 138, FA L L 2020

Alabama Heritage Stories of Alabama that Educate, Inspire, and Entertain

Tuscumbia’s Helen Keller Library

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Table of Contents FEATURES REVISITING THE McCRARYS, ALABAMA’S OLDEST FARM FAMILY

BY JOSEPH M. JONES

The McCrary Farm, the oldest in Alabama under continuous ownership, is experiencing several exciting new developments in its 211th year.

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Cover: While still a child, Helen Keller championed a library for her hometown of Tuscumbia. It was the first public library in Alabama.

See article page 44.

(Library of Congress)

ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE: SHANDY JONES MAKES HIS WAY THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY G. WARD HUBBS

DEPARTMENTS 4 Portraits & Landscapes The Trail of Tears in the Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area 54 Behind the Image Color My Garden Black and White 56 From the Archives A Virtual Exploration: Alabama History@Home

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KYMULGA GRIST MILL: AN OPERATING MID-NINETEENTHCENTURY ALABAMA WATERMILL

BY KEN BOYD

Though today it is part of a historical park in Childersburg, the Kymulga Grist Mill has been in operation since 1864.

60 Adventures in Genealogy Embracing the Genohistorian Within

www.AlabamaHeritage.com

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HELEN KELLER AND THE LITTLE LIBRARY THAT COULD

BY EMILY MCMACKIN DYE

62 Nature Journal Featherfoils!

64 Reading the Southern Past Photographing Alabama

From servitude to freedom, from poverty to wealth, from barber to minister and legislator, Shandy Jones triumphed through the most difficult of times.

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More than a century ago, a teenaged Helen Keller inspired a band of book lovers in her hometown with a vision, and their perseverance built Alabama’s first publicly chartered library.

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A twelve-year-old Helen Keller (left) with her teacher and lifelong companion Anne Sullivan, photographed in 1893, the same year the Helen Keller Library received its charter. (Library of Congress)

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HELEN KELLER AND THE LITTLE LIBRARY THAT COULD More than a century ago, a teenaged Helen Keller inspired a band of book lovers in her hometown with a vision. Their perseverance built Alabama’s first publicly chartered library.

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Among the enduring gifts this Alabamian gave the world is one she left to her hometown of Tuscumbia, the Northwest Alabama town where she was born and taught by Anne Sullivan.

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elen Keller is known worldwide not only for meeting the challenges of her deafness and blindness but also for championing education and economic justice for those with disabilities. With the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, she grew from an uncontrollable deaf-blind child desperate to communicate into an accomplished author, lecturer, and activist whose words and example still inspire hope for anyone facing obstacles.

Though she could not see or hear, Keller actively engaged in the world around her and devoted much of her life to making it better for others. As a writer, she penned hundreds of articles, essays, and speeches advocating for causes from suffrage to workers’ rights.

As a humanitarian, she tirelessly traveled the globe improving the lives and conditions of the blind and disabled.

Among the enduring gifts this Alabamian gave the world is one she left to her hometown of Tuscumbia, the Northwest Alabama town where she was born and taught by Sullivan, who enabled her to learn language by spelling into her hand from the manual alphabet. As Keller’s grasp and appreciation of words grew, so did her love of books and reading. Frequent trips with Sullivan to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, expanded Keller’s vocabulary even more and exposed her to thousands of embossed books in the school library—the first in the nation to provide reading material to the blind. While studying at Perkins in 1892, twelve-year-old Keller wrote a letter to her mother asking why Tuscumbia didn’t have a place where people could interact with books like she could.

Kate Keller did not have an answer, but her daughter’s simple question inspired her and several other ladies in town to form the Helen Keller Library and Literary Association,

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which founded Alabama’s first publicly chartered library on October 13, 1893. Not only was the library Helen’s idea, but in its earliest days, she helped support it, writing to friends she and Sullivan had made in the Boston area to ask for books and donations to the building fund.

More than a century later, the library that bears Keller’s name continues to be a vital part of the cultural and civic life of Tuscumbia, drawing patrons of all ages and serving as a hub of information, inspiration, and activism in the city of more than 8,000. As one of the state’s oldest sustaining libraries, it has provided continuous service through recessions, wars, and funding crises. It has hosted thousands of storytimes for children, hundreds of meetings for service and literary clubs, and countless community events through the years at its location just two blocks from Keller’s birthplace at Ivy Green.

Most people in Tuscumbia and its surrounding communities assume the library was named for Keller because of her global reputation, but few know about her role in bringing it into existence, says former head librarian Tammie Collins. “If she could visit the library today and see how it has evolved and how people here use it, I believe she would be thrilled,” Collins says. “She would be so proud to see how the community has supported the library throughout its history and how it has grown into such a valuable part of Tuscumbia.”

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ibraries flourished in New England during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century as rapid economic growth produced philanthropists who used their wealth to build public institutions such as hospitals, schools, and libraries. But in southern states like Alabama, with largely rural communities and rampant illiteracy and poverty, only a handful of libraries existed. Most were associated with universities or housed in the homes or offices of wealthy residents.

Home to Alabama’s first railinstead to see specialists, includroad, Tuscumbia was a buring inventor Alexander Graham geoning commercial center in Bell, a renowned educator of the late 1800s and a hub for train the deaf. Bell urged the Kellers traffic throughout the South as to write to Michael Anagnos, part of the Memphis & Charlesdirector of the Perkins School, ton Railroad line. The city serwhich Dr. Howe had founded. ved as the county seat of Colbert Anagnos responded by sending County, which bordered the Tentwenty-one-year-old Sullivan, an nessee River and housed some of orphaned graduate in need of the earliest schools for boys and work, to Tuscumbia. girls in the area.

Upon her arrival in March Arthur Keller, Helen’s father, 1887, Sullivan began teaching published and edited the town Keller language by having her feel newspaper, The North Alabamobjects, then spelling out their ian, and had a small library at names into her hand with signs home for his collection of books, from the manual alphabet. But which included classics such as this meant nothing more than Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales finger play to Keller until one Above: Dr. Samuel Howe, a Boston physician, from Shakespeare and essays by spring day when the two visited was the first person to teach the alphabet to a French philosopher Michel de the pump house, and Sullivan deaf-blind person, Laura Bridgman. He founded Montaigne. His wife, Kate, was placed Keller’s hand under the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, where the an educated Memphis belle and spout, spelling the word water Kellers found Anne Sullivan and where Helen went voracious reader with a taste into her palm as the cool stream to school for several years. (Wikimedia Commons). for poetry and French literature. gushed down.

Opposite page: The play The Miracle Worker is She also had literary roots on “Suddenly I felt a misty conperformed every year at Ivy Green, Keller’s birthher mother’s side as a distant sciousness as of something place in Tuscumbia. (Library of Congress) cousin to prominent minister forgotten—a thrill of returning and author Everett Edward Hale, thought; and somehow the mysknown for his short story “The Man Without a Country.” tery of language was revealed to me,” Keller recalled in her Though Kate spent most of her time supervising the ser1903 autobiography The Story of My Life. “I knew then that vants and household at Ivy Green—named for the English ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was ivy covering the property—she cherished books and enjoyed flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, conversing with others about politics and culture. It was gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” while reading Charles Dickens’s 1842 travelogue American The breakthrough opened up the world to Keller. Within Notes that she first learned about Boston physician Dr. months, she learned hundreds of words and began using Samuel Howe and his success teaching the manual alphabet simple sentences and expressions. Reading became the next to Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind girl in America to be step in her education. Sullivan spelled stories and poems formally educated. The account fueled Kate’s hopes that her into Keller’s hands to illustrate lessons, but she felt her own daughter Helen could also be taught. literary knowledge was inadequate to satisfy the growing Born June 27, 1880, Helen was a bright, precocious child curiosity of her pupil. who had already begun walking and talking before illness In a May 22, 1887, letter to Sophia Hopkins, a Perkins robbed her of hearing and sight when she was nineteen School friend, Sullivan wrote: “I’ve made up my mind about months old. In the years after, she became increasingly one thing: Helen must learn to use books—indeed we both difficult to control. Family and friends urged the Kellers to must learn how to use them.” With the help of the Perkins put her in an asylum, but they refused, taking her up North School, Sullivan had words printed in raised letters on slips A L A B A M A

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The next spring, Keller visited the Perkins School for the first time, where she met other children who spoke her language of finger spelling and explored the diverse selection of embossed books in the school library.

of cardboard so Keller could feel them with her fingers. With each slip signifying an object, act, or quality, Keller placed the cardboard pieces on objects in the room to form sentences— a game she loved playing for hours at a time. “From the printed slip it was but a step to the printed book,” Keller recalled.

“I took my ‘Reader for Beginners’ and hunted for the words I knew; when I found them my joy was like that of a game of hide-and-seek. Thus I began to read.”

The two had reading lessons daily, often in the crook of Ivy Green’s trees, where they would sit with Keller’s raised print primer and search for words she had learned. “We make a sort of game of it and try to see who can find the words most quickly, Helen with her fingers, or I with my eyes,” Sullivan wrote. “When her fingers light upon the words she knows, she fairly screams with pleasure and hugs and kisses me for joy, especially if she thinks she has me beaten.” She described

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Above: Helen Keller studied at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, starting in 1888. Her love for the school library inspired her wish for a public library in Tuscumbia. (Boston Public Library/Creative Commons) Opposite page: The first home of the Helen Keller Library was in a room of the Deshler Female Institute. The library was only open on Saturday afternoons. (Helen Keller Library) Keller’s longing to read in a June 2, 1887, letter to Hopkins, explaining that “she grasps the import of whole sentences, catching from the context the meaning of words she doesn’t know; and her eager questions indicate the outward reaching of her mind and its unusual powers.”

The next spring, Keller visited the Perkins School for the first time, where she met other children well-versed in the language of finger spelling and explored the diverse selec-

tion of embossed books in the school library, along with its collection of animal and bird specimens and other tactile objects. Keller visited the library every day, where she would “wander from bookcase to bookcase, and take down whatever book my fingers lighted upon.”

She spent the next few winters at the Perkins School, where she learned to read and write in Braille and studied French, arithmetic, and other subjects. But books captivated her the most, especially poetry, history, and stories of heroism and adventure. She would read for hours, laying aside her books reluctantly, and discovered favorite writers, like poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. In 1890, Holmes invited Keller to visit his Boston home and welcomed her into his library, where she was enchanted by the “odor of print and leather in the room which told me it was full of books, and I stretched out my hands instinctively to find them.”

Leaving the Perkins library one day, Keller “appeared more serious than usual, and I asked the cause,” Sullivan noted in an 1891 report. She replied, “I am thinking how much wiser we always are when we leave here than we are when we come.” When Sullivan asked why she loved books, Keller said, “Because they tell me so much that is interesting about things I cannot see, and they are never tired or troubled like people. They tell me over and over what I want to know.”

Around this time, Keller wrote to her mother, expressing the need for a library in her hometown and her wish to start one. Kate shared her daughter’s suggestion with a group of friends known locally as the Saturday Evening Club. The group consisted of six ladies, including Keller’s mother and her cousin, Leila Fairfax Keller Lasseter, who met in each other’s homes on weekends to discuss books and current events. The women were so inspired by the idea that they changed the name of their club to the Helen Keller Library and Literary Association and embarked on a mission to establish a free public library in Tuscumbia.

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n the fall of 1892, the Helen Keller Library and Literacy Association began recruiting new members and soliciting funds and materials for the future institution. Keller and Sullivan were named lifetime members and participated in fundraising from afar, asking wealthy friends in Boston and other parts of the country to donate books and periodicals. Former Alabama governor Robert Burns Lindsay, who lived and practiced law in Tuscumbia, helped the ladies secure a charter for the library on October 13, 1893, but the group lacked a permanent location to house their growing stockpile of books.

In an October 21, 1893, letter to Boston socialite Louise Pomeroy Inches, Keller explained, “At present there is no library of any sort in the town. That is why I thought about starting one. My mother and several of my lady friends said they would help me, and they formed a club, the object of which is to work for the establishment of a free public library in Tuscumbia. They have now about 100 books and about $55 in money.” She also described the cause as “near to my heart” in a December 24, 1893, letter to Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan, thanking him for his donation of books and a map. “To give people good books to read is, as you say, a beautiful benevolence,” she wrote Morgan, “and I, with the rest of my friends, am determined that Tuscumbia should own a good public library.”

Keller received hundreds of books, along with money and encouragement, from her Boston friends. Donations ranged from encyclopedias and volumes of Shakespeare to poetry and storybooks, all of which were in excellent condition. Contributions poured in so rapidly that within a year, the association had received more than 2,000 books and magazines.

The library opened on January 13, 1894, in a room at the Deshler Female Institute, a local private school for girls.

Townspeople donated furnishings and bookcases, and the library was open every Saturday afternoon. To cover operat-

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On March 8, 1894, the association held a reception at the institute honoring Keller and her teacher during one of their visits home. Hundreds of people packed the hall until there was no room left to stand.

In 1897 the library association put aside plans to build a new library and instead purchased a former carriage showroom known as the opera house for $1,400. (Library of Congress) ing costs, the association sold 50-cent tickets that permitted locals to check out books for a year for free.

On March 8, 1894, the association held a reception at the institute honoring Keller and her teacher during one of their visits home. Hundreds of people packed the hall until there was no room left to stand, according to coverage in The North Alabamian. Keller, who was attending school in New York to study speech and lip reading, addressed the crowd.

“I cannot see your faces, as you can see mine: but when God gives us the clearest sight He does but touch our hearts with love,” she said. “So, you see, I know there is a proud, glad look in your faces tonight, because you now realize what a very respectable little library has grown up in your midst.” She urged the audience to buy library tickets and greeted guests in the library, “recognizing scores of her acquaintances whom she had not met for a year or more by the touch of her hand,” the newspaper reported.

Despite the community enthusiasm and Keller’s endorsement, the library was plagued with funding problems from

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the start. Association members took turns serving as librarians without pay.

They sponsored oyster suppers, tea parties, and musical and theatrical performances to raise money for a building they hoped to construct on a lot donated by association president M. J. Russell.

Before they could save enough to build on the lot, they heard about a building being auctioned at the corner of North Main and East Fourth Streets.

Built in 1836 by Isaac Young as a showroom for his carriage factory, the opera house, as it was called, was used as a venue for traveling theatre troupes and vaudeville acts. The ladies purchased the building for $1,400 at half its price, agreeing to pay off the rest over the next few years. According to an April 1897 article in The Weekly Dispatch, other townspeople refrained from bidding due to “the fact that the Association is considered a public institution, is without a building and for several years has been laboring and struggling to occupy a home of its own.”

Association members dedicated the building on September 10, 1897, but spent the next few years completing extensive renovations and renting the bottom floor to shop owners to pay off the building debt. When they finally moved into the building in the summer of 1900, they kept the opera house upstairs open for their lyceum series, sponsoring performances and programs to raise funds.

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y the turn of the century, Tuscumbia had developed into a thriving town with numerous businesses and a rising population. The library grew, too, amassing more than 6,000 books and magazines and continually adding more. In keeping with the social and scholarly roots of their organization, ladies in the association met weekly to discuss the latest news and participate in literary programs exploring topics from state history to world cultures.

A few months after a 1916 visit to Tuscumbia, Keller sent the library this signed portait from her home in Massachusetts “with loving greetings to my birthplace.” (Helen Keller Library) Records show little about Keller’s ties to the library beyond its early years, though association members entertained her occasionally during her visits home. In January 1905, they held a reception for her at a local residence just as she was gaining national acclaim for publishing her life story and graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College, becoming the first deaf-blind person in the United States to earn a college degree. Keller received nearly a hundred guests in the home, which was decorated in the association’s colors of blue, white, and pink with a gilt-lettered banner displaying its motto: “Press Forward; He Conquers Who Will.” The event was also covered in the local paper. “Miss Keller was becomingly attired in a gown of white crepe de chine with lace trimmings and looked the soul of purity and beauty,” reported The North Alabamian. “With her bright smile and cordial handshake, she made her old friends feel that she was genuinely glad to be among them again.”

Keller returned to the area in February 1916 to speak at the State Normal School in Florence, now the University of

North Alabama, accompanied by Sullivan, who served as interpreter for her lectures. The association hosted a luncheon on their behalf, during which club president J. N. Thompson thanked Keller for her encouragement, acknowledging that “it is through our love and honor for you and your name that we have received the inspiration to maintain the integrity of our undertaking.”

That winter, the library received $100 from Keller and her teacher to help with building costs. Keller also gifted the library a signed photograph of herself taken in her home in Wrentham, Massachusetts. Dated November 6, 1916, she dedicated it to “the library Tuscumbia Alabama with loving greetings to my birthplace.”

The association continued renting out much of its building until the 1930s to cover expenses. It housed county offices for a year after the Colbert County Courthouse burned in 1908. The library also shared space with the post office until 1936, along with a dance school. A ledger kept by the association during this time shows that the group did try to obtain a grant through the Carnegie Library fund established by billionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie, but did not meet the conditions to qualify for it.

Nonetheless, during the Great Depression in 1933, the library hired its first paid librarian, Elizabeth Henderson.

Under her leadership, the library flourished, increasing its demand enough to raise annual admission to a dollar and open its doors three days a week. It operated solely through association dues, donations, and patron support until 1947, when the city of Tuscumbia began providing $50 a month in financial support.

Tuscumbia resident and lifelong bookworm Norma Manush checked out her first books at the library at six years old and visited once a week through the 1940s and 1950s.

The space was small by modern standards, she recalls, with dark wood paneling, wall-to-wall bookshelves, and just a few tables and chairs. Though it smelled rather musty and lacked the inviting atmosphere it has today, it had books Manush couldn’t find in her small elementary school library.

Henderson was the picture of a stern librarian with her hair swept up in a bun, horn-rimmed glasses, and a low tolerance for nonsense, but her passion for books was evident.

“She was all business but very knowledgeable,” Manush says.

“She knew what all the books were about and kept them shelved just right.” Henderson could point to any book in the library and “had a twinkle in her eye that invited you to ask questions,” says Tuscumbia native Terry Christison.

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The $120,000 Greek Revival library building opened on June 11, 1967, nearly a year before Keller died at age eighty-seven. Fully furnished with landscaped grounds, the 5,600-squarefoot building was equipped with modern features, including acoustic tiles, a reading room, and sections for children and young adults. An annex with meeting rooms was built in 1997 with funds raised by the Friends of the Library, a volunteer group of patrons formed in the 1990s.

In 1967 the Helen Keller Library moved into a new building, constructed at a cost of $120,000. The library’s namesake and founder died the following year. (Robert Dye) In the summers, Christison and his best friend, Mike, would walk a mile and a half to the library once a week to hunt for books that caught their eye and check out a few to share between them. “It wasn’t the biggest library, but it gave us a place where we could go to find anything we wanted to read about,” Christison recalls.

In 1957 the library consolidated with the Muscle Shoals Regional Library System, which allowed it to operate without charging fees or rentals. By 1965 it was once again outgrowing its quarters. With the blessing of the city, association members sold the building they had occupied for more than sixty years and began constructing a new home at the corner of North Commons and Main Street near Ivy Green. The city provided the land and funds to match the $25,000 the association received from the sale of its former building, which was demolished to build a bank.

Association members raised thousands more for the library through a campaign in which citizens contributed to the building fund in memory of loved ones. Local funds were matched with funds from the Library Services Act, established in 1956 to promote the development of public libraries in rural areas.

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oday, the library Keller envisioned as a young girl is a touchstone of the community, with summer reading programs for children and adults, continuing education classes, book pickup services for homebound residents, computers for public use, laptops for checkout, and more than 100,000 materials in circulation.

The association that served as its lifeblood for decades still meets monthly to review books and explore ways to better their community.

“Helen loved to experience life through reading—and that’s something we can all do,” says Keller Johnson Thompson, Keller’s great-grand niece and executive vice president of education for the Helen Keller Foundation for Education and Research, a Birmingham-based nonprofit that works to prevent blindness and deafness globally through advancing education and medical research. Thompson frequently shares Keller’s story with children at the library as part of the foundation’s character education program for schools. Not only are they amazed by what Keller could do despite her handicaps, but they also discover how books became her eyes and ears in a world she could only imagine through words. “She read over 10,000 books throughout her life,” Thompson says. “She wanted to learn and grow, and reading was the quickest way for her to do that, whether it was science, philosophy or the latest book written by her friend Mark Twain.”

Students are especially excited when they realize that the library they are sitting in today began with a wish Keller made when she was just a child herself. In that respect, the Helen Keller Library may be one of her greatest legacies. ah

THE HELEN KELLER LIBRARY TODAY In its 127th year, the library is growing to meet the needs of its patrons.

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ibraries have changed tremendously since Helen Keller’s day, evolving from solitary information centers into collaborative multimedia hubs, but community support has remained the constant factor that has kept the Helen Keller Library growing to meet the needs of its patrons.

“The love people have for this library is what has kept it going,” says former librarian Tammie Collins, who headed up the library’s most recent renovation. During her tenure, local businesses, city organizations, and civic clubs stepped up to donate funds and volunteer labor to update the exterior and interior of the building with everything from new flooring, shelving, and computers to WiFi hotspots and an LED sign for announcing community events.

The renovation transformed the library into a more vibrant, interactive space with imaginative displays that engage book lovers and comfy seating inviting them to sit and linger. Circulation has since skyrocketed, and the library has added nearly nine hundred new patrons. New partnerships with area schools and daycares have also helped expand its younger patron base.

Along with events like its summer reading program, the library has brought accomplished Alabama authors to the library as part of its Writers to Readers Literary Series, co-

Since its most recent renovation, the library has increased its circulation and added nearly 900 new patrons. (Robert Dye) sponsored with the Alabama Writers’ Forum. The series featured public readings and Q&As as well as school visits allowing students to interact with authors firsthand.

In recent years, the library has celebrated its deep ties to Keller through the exhibit “I Wake From a Dream,” created by photographer and retired University of North Alabama professor Wayne Sides and Jeanie Thompson, author of The Myth of Water: Poems From the Life of Helen Keller. The exhibit depicts Helen’s life, loves, and coming of age through photographs, collages, excerpts of letters, and lines of poetry from Thompson’s collection.

In 2018 the library marked its 125th anniversary, with festivities that included the unveiling of an oil portrait of Keller and her teacher by Tuscumbia artist Martha Carpenter. In the image, reproduced from an original photo, Sullivan reads aloud as Keller touches her lips to feel the vibration of the words. Inscribed in canvas above are Keller’s words, which encapsulate her love of books and perhaps what she hoped they might one day mean to others in her hometown: “When I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.”

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Contributors REVISITING THE McCRARYS, ALABAMA’S OLDEST FARM FAMILY

him to the close-knit descendants of Shandy Jones. And last year, the Alabama Historical Association presented his Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making (also University of Alabama Press) with the Coley award. Guy and his wife, Pat, live in Tuscaloosa.

BY JOSEPH M. JONES Joseph M. Jones—eighty-nine years old and a former Montgomery, Alabama, newsman—joined Army forces at Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal as a civilian employee in public relations in 1956. In late 1959, he was chosen as one of a few to make ready the establishment in 1960 of the NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center from within the Army organization. He became the first director of the Marshall Center news department and worked as the news chief for fourteen years. From news director, he became director of public affairs, where he worked until retirement. In those NASA capacities he traveled widely, frequently with Marshall director Wernher von Braun. He worked at and witnessed the launching of each of the Marshall Center’s thirty-two Saturn rockets, the world’s largest, as well as the earliest space shuttles. He wrote the fivepage press kit for the free world’s first satellite, Explorer I, and participated with many others in preparing the 250-page press kit for man’s first landing on the moon. His published writings include The Wondrous McCrarys—Alabama Pioneers: Same Family, Same Farm, 200 Years; My Times—Boxwoods Among the Rockets, a memoir; and Doing the Possible, a history of the oldest church in his native Cleburne County, Alabama. Each is available on Amazon.com.

ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE: SHANDY JONES MAKES HIS WAY THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

BY G. WARD HUBBS G. Ward Hubbs started his career as Alabama Heritage’s first assistant editor. He then spent two decades at BirminghamSouthern College, where he is now professor emeritus and archivist for the Methodists in north Alabama. His research into the ideas and values of everyday Alabamians in the nineteenth century led to several books: Guarding Greensboro (University of Georgia Press) won two national awards for the best book written on the Civil War. Searching for Freedom: Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman (University of Alabama Press), from which this article on Shandy Jones is drawn, won a regional award; even better, the book’s publication introduced

KYMULGA GRIST MILL: AN OPERATING MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY ALABAMA WATERMILL

BY KEN BOYD Ken Boyd has been a passionate, enthusiastic, and awardwinning photographer and writer for more than four decades.

His latest book, entitled Historic Watermills of North America, A Visual Preservation, is scheduled for release by the University of Alabama Press in November 2020. He has previously published two popular and internationally distributed books on locomotives entitled Historic North American Locomotives (Kalmbach Publishing Company, 2018) and The Art of the Locomotive (Voyageur Press, The Quartos Group, 2014). Boyd is also the editor for The Mid-South Flyer, a bimonthly publication of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, and his work has been featured in several other historic books and in numerous magazines, journals, and trade publications. He has taught photography at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Samford University since 1985.

HELEN KELLER AND THE LITTLE LIBRARY THAT COULD

BY EMILY MCMACKIN DYE Emily McMackin Dye is a freelance features writer based in Memphis, Tennessee, and a native of Tuscumbia, Alabama, who grew up attending storytimes and checking out books at the Helen Keller Public Library. She has a longtime affinity for Helen Keller thanks to her father, the late Mike McMackin, who founded the Helen Keller Festival and served on the Helen Keller Property Board at Ivy Green for more than thirty years.

Dye graduated from the University of Alabama in 2000 with an MA in literary journalism and writes about history, historic preservation, and culture for custom and newsstand magazines.

Special thanks for research assistance with this article goes to librarian Tammie Collins and the late Terrye Sledge Terry, whose written histories of the library proved invaluable to the story.

Please visit www.AlabamaHeritage.com for indexes and extended information about our articles and their authors.

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