"William Bartram: First Scientist of Alabama" by John C. Hall

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NUMBER 72, SPRING 2004

ALABAMA HERITAGE

PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AND THE ALABAMA DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY

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Cover: As World War One drew to a dose, Sergeant Leon Ragsdale McGavock was anxious to see his family once again, but fate had other plans. See atticle, page 14.

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2004

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THE LESS THINGS CHANGE: CHARLES BROOKS AND THE ART OF ALABAMA POLITICS

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By James L. Baggett Like any good political cattoonist, Charles Brooks of the Birmingham News played the patt of both prophet and couttjester.

ALABAMA AND WORLD WAR ONE: THE GOLD STAR COLLECTION

14

By Sam Duvall

To memorialize Alabama soldiers who gave their lives in World War One, families sent volumes of information and photos to the state archives. The collection bears the name of a readily recognizable symbol ofheroic sacrifice-the gold star.

WILLIAM BARTRAM: FIRST SCIENTIST OF ALABAMA

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By fohn C. Hall William Battram left the comfotts of home to venture into what was then the mythic wilderness of the Alabama region where he would illuminate in words and drawings the unchatted enchantment of the South.

LILLIAN GOODNER: QUEEN OF THE SEPIAS

34

By Marc Bankett Lillian Goodner's photographs are not only a colleaion offaces from music's history, but also a reflection of American history itself

DEPARTMENTS Southern Architecture and Preservation: The Old Rock House Alabama Treasures: "Alabama": Story of a Song Nature Journal: Opossums Contributors, Sources, and Suggested Readings Alabama Album: Behind the Smile A L A B A l\II A H E RIT AG E : S PRI NG

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46 49 51 52 2004

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This world, as a glorious apartment ofthe boundless palace of the sovereign Creator, is furnished with m1 infinite variety ofanimated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing, equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all his creatures. -William Bartram N THE EVE OF THE AMERICAN Revolution, William Bartram left behind his home and his business failures in Philadelphia to journey to the Southeast, a mythic frontier of uncharted rivers, unknown flora, and exotic tribes. His three-year journey to study the region established Bartram, then in his midthirties, as among the young nation's greatest scientists.

He became an eloquent witness to her natural wonders and native inhabitants. His book, commonly referred to as Bartram's Travels, has endured as one of the most important documents of American science and the first book of Alabama natural history.

William Bartram came from a family of American Quakers. His father, John Bartram, ran a successful nursery business from his Schuylkill River farm near Philadelphia. A self-taught botanist, he sold seeds and cuttings to his English Quaker colleagues, most notably Peter Collinson, a prominent and well-connected London businessman, supporter of English natural history, and leader in the emerging English enthusiasm for more natural gardenif}g. Through John Bartram, Collinson was able to supply his contemporaries with exotic plants from America, and through Collinson and his contemporaries, John Bartram enjoyed an international reputation. The lauded Swedish scientist, Linnaeus, recognizing his selftaught, energetic abilities, reportedly hailed him as "the greatest natural botanist in the world." In 1743, along with lifelong friend Benjamin Franklin, the elder Bartram became one of the founders of the American Philosophical Society, America's first scientific society.

John Bartram took care to nourish his son's interests, for they meshed easily with his own. William was sent to the Philadelphia Academy, where he excelled at natural history. By age fourteen he was already distinguishing himself as an artist, and his drawings and paintings were circulating in Europe. But this was a day when science was still a hobby, and John was concerned to set William up in a career. He even proposed an apprenticeship in Franklin's print shop. John complained to Collinson: My so11 William is just tumed si:xteen. It is 11ow time to propose some way for him to get his living by. I don't want

him to be what is commonly called a gentleman . ... I am afraid that botany and drawing will not afford him one, and hard labor don't agree with him.

In 1765, after the French and Indian War, Collinson arranged to have the elder Bartram appointed King's Botanist to explore the newly won French territories.

William Bartram accompanied his father on a lengthy exploratory trip to Florida and Georgia. Dazzled by what he saw, the young Bartram borrowed against his inheritance to set himself up as a planter in Florida. But even with help from his father and from famjly friend Henry Laurens in Charleston, the result was a disaster. His location was isolated with poor soil, he was ill, and mostly, his heart just was not in it. In a letter to John, Laurens described Bartram's situation, "In fact ... no colouring can do justice to the forlorn state of poor Billy Bartram."

Despite Bartram 's dose association with Native Americans, his sketches capture the image of only one. Mico Chlucco, the Lo¡ng Warrior, serves as thefrontispiece a/Travels. (Courtesy American Philosophical Society.)

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Bartram gave up farming and began seeking natural history art commissions through his father's Quaker contacts. Mter several years, he contacted Dr. John Fothergill, an English physician and natural history enthusi ast, who in 1772 agreed to sponsor him on an extended trip into the Southeast to draw and collect plants.

At age thirty-three, William Bartram was a professional botanist at last.

During his travels, Bartram worked his wide circle of friends and family for introductions and support. Traveling alone and with friends and traders, he made extended trips into Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, separated by periods of town life where he could work on his paintings and package seeds and cuttings for Fothergill.

Over the next three years, he sent his sponsor 209 dried plant specimens and fifty-nine natural history drawings, plus a lengthy report on the first years of his travels.

He found himself intrigued by north central Florida, especially the Alachua Prairie near present-day Gainesville. He got along particularly well with Cowkeeper, a Lower Creek chief, who perceived his good intentions and, to Bartram's lasting delight, dubbed him Puc Puggy, or l~ lower Hunter. He also spent time with Long Warrior, a powerful and impressive warrior from Cuscowilla. Years later, Bartram drew his portrait as a frontispiece for Travels. Despite his close association with Indians, he never drew another Indian portrait.

Reading Bartram 's Travels gives the impression that the author was living out in the woods with the Indians.

In fact, he was living and writing in Charleston and Savannah during the beginnings of the American Revolution. The coming revolution bitterly divided the South, and it was by no means clear which side to join. In Charleston, Bartram visited the home of John Stuart, the Royal Superintendent of Indian Affairs. One of Bartram's closest advisors was prominent Loyalist physician Dr. Lionel Chalmers, who also served as Dr. Fothergill's financi al agent. He also had numerous friends on the other side. His old family friend Henry Laurens became president of the Continental Congress.

George Galphin, the prominent Augusta Indian trader and revolutionary, had served both John and William as

their entree to the Lower Creeks. While Bartram's family inclined toward revolution, British sponsors were paying for his travels.

For a couple of years he retraced the route through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Florida that he and his father had taken several years before. But with a foot in each camp, the situation was becoming difficult, and he decided on a lengthy trip into the interior.

In April of 1775, he headed up the Savannah River, intending to cross over the mountains into Tennessee to visit and collect specimens among the Cherokee . But agents, both Loyalist and Revolutionary, were stirring up trouble among the Indians, casting the frontier into an uproar. Then came news of ominous events at Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, Bartram consulted with friends , found a group of traders heading south, and set out for the Creek country, a desire both he and his father had shared for years.

ARTRA.J~l

ENTERED THE PRESEJ\'T

state of Alabama in July of 1775, crossing the Chattahoochee at Yuchi, south of modern-day Phenix City, and heading west along the well-traversed Indian path to Mobile. He followed the South bank of the Tallapoosa River through Tallassee and Atasi to Coo lome, just east of Montgomery, where he noted the sudden appearance of Spanish moss in the trees and visited his contact, trader James Germany. There, he turned south and crossed the "expansive, illumined grassy plains" of the Black Belta mixture of groves and fields, thick with plums, crabapples, strawberries, and sunflowers. Anyone familiar with the Black Belt will recognize his description:

The upper stratum or vegetable mould of these plai11s is perfectly black, soapy and rich, especially after rains, and renders the road very slippery; it lies on a deep bed of white, testaceous, limesto11e rock which in someplaces resembles chalk, and in other places are strata or subterrene banks of vmious kinds of sea shells, as ostrea, &c. these dissolving near the sutface of the earth, and mixing with the supeificial mould, render it extremely productive.

The party then entered into a "vast open forest which continued above seventy miles" in which the trees were of a "much larger growth" than those of Georgia and Carolina. Clearings exhibited large quantities of grapes that crept along from shrub to shrub, their huge bunches of fruit nearly touching the ground. Bartram would later write about how the Indians made raisins from them.

In present-day Butler County, Alabama, Bartram encountered the Dog Woods-a nine-mile continuous canopy of dogwood trees, here and there pierced by lone magnolias. Modern foresters puzzle over what conditions would lead to such a forest.

Some speculate that a hurricane might have blown down the big trees, leaving only the dogwoods.

As Bartram and his fellow travelers continued, they crossed the pine barrens that originally covered so much of south Alabama. These longleaf pine savannas, the product of lightning-induced fires and perhaps of fires deliberately set by Indians, offered an open landscape of scattered pines surrounded by grass and herbs. Once one of the most distinctive features of south Alabama, this longleaf pine forest has almost completely vanished, and much of its distinctive fauna-for example the red-cockaded woodpecker, gopher tortoise, and indigo snake-is now endangered.

By the end of july, Bartram's party reached the lower Alabama River country. They moved southward into what is now Baldwin County, where they struck the Tensaw River at Tensa Bluff, near Stockton (probably at present-day Lower Bryant Landing). So anxious was Bartram to reach Mobile that he boarded a boat the next morning. He would soon be disappointed.

He found Mobile mostly in ruins and reduced in size, many of the French inhabitants having left for Louisiana after their defeat by the British in the French ;md Indian War twelve years before. Indian traders prospered, but the town had not yet discovered its future as a cotton port. Returning to Tensa, Bartram introduced himself to Major Robert Farmar, the British senior officer whose plantation was on the Tensaw River. Farmar took him in and provided him with a canoe, which Bartram used to explore the Mobile Delta in one of his most interesting and productive periods of discovery.

Bartram traveled this path across the southern portion of the state. (Map without path© 1957 by Erwin Raisz. Reprinted with pennission by Raisz Landjo1m Maps.)

Opposite this bluff[011 the Tombigbee River near Bates Lake], on the other side of the river, is a district of swamp or lowland, the richest I ever saw•, or perhaps any where to be seen; as for the trees, I shall forbear to describe them, because it would appear incredible, let it suffice to mention, that the Cypress, Ash, Sycamore, Poplar, Sweetgttm and others, are by far the tallest, straitest a11d every way the most enormous that I have seen or heard of And as a proof of the incredible fertility ofthe soil, the reeds or canes (Arundo gigantea) grow here thirty orforty feet high, and as thick as a mmz's arm, or three orfour i11ches in diamete1~· I suppose onejoint ofsome of them would contain above a quart of water.

The "most enormous that I have seen" are strong words from the most experienced southern botanist of his day. Fighting illness, Bartram worked the vast swamp, discovering the giant primrose near present-day Hubbard's Landing and the cherry laurel and pyramid magnolia at Boatyard Lake (the future site of Fort Mims).

He finally received word of a boat leaving for Louisiana, but when he got to Mobile, it was delayed. He took the opportunity to visit Pensacola, spending the first night on the beach at Mobile Point and the second in Pensacola. Being shy of revealing himself to the authori-

Parts of the old Federal Road, such as this portion in Macou County, are still visible even one hundred andfifty years after the height of its use. (Photograph by 1lfark Dauber.)

The trader obliged me with his company on a visit to the Alabama an !Jidian towJ/ at the confluence of r-&Jo fine rivers, the Tallapoose and the Coosau, which here resign their names to the great Alabama, where are to be seen traces of the aJicimt French fortress, Thoulouse; here are yet lyi11g, half buried in the earth, a few pier:es of ordnance, four and six pounders. f observed, iJI a very thrivi11g condition, two or three very large apple trees, planted here by the French. This is, perhaps, one of the most eligible situations for a city in the world; a level plain between the conflux of two majestic rivers, which are exactly of equal magnitude in appearance, each navigable for vessels and perreauguas at least 500 miles above it, and spreading their mtmerous branches over the most fertile and delightful regions, ma11y hundred miles before we reach their sources in the Apalachean mou11tains . ... Stayed all 11ight at Alabama, where we had a grand entertainmmt at the public square, with music and dancing, and retumed next day to /11lucc/asse.

ties, he was nevertheless recognized and greeted warmly by the governor, Peter Chester, who tried to get him to ray and botanize west Florida. l~ inally setting off for Louisiana, he became seriously ill and was nursed back to health by a planter on the Mis issippi coast. Somewhat recovered, he spent the fall in Louisiana. There he was befriended by William Dunbar, the prominent Louisiana naturalist and planter who invited him to his plantation near Baton Rouge. By mid-November, Bartram had returned to Mobile. Shipping his specimens to Dr. Fothergill in England, he returned upriver to Parmar's plantation and, on November 27, set out with a band of traders back up the trail to the Creek Nation.

He spent December with the Creeks, mostly with trader John Tapley at the Indian town of Mucclasse in present-day Elmore County. While there, he accompanied Tapley down the Tallapoosa to Alabama Town, where he saw the ruins of French Fort Toulouse:

At Mucclasse, Bartram attended an Indian wedding, and at the important Creek town of Atasi he participated in an elaborate Indian council. He described his stay in the Creek towns with care, including the black drink ceremony and the layout of the council house. He also made a detailed description of Creek houses and villages and other important ob ervations of Creek culture.

Scant physical evidence remains of William Bartram's visit to Alabama. There is no original documentation of his trip, nor does the existing draft for Travels include the Alabama portion. Thanks to the transformation of the Indians' Great Path to .Mobile into the Federal Road, his route through Alabama is well established. And thanks largely to the amount of archaeology done on the Indian towns that he visited, several Bartram locales are identified precisely enough that they can be located today.

Perhaps the closest one could get to experiencing Bartram in contemporary Alabama is at tl1e Alabama

Department of Archives and History, which houses the chase of a French four-pounder cannon, removed from Fort Toulouse, and surely one of the guns noted by Bartram in his description of the ruined French fort. For many years it was used to fire patriotic salutes in Montgomery. In 1825, during the celebration of the inauguration of John Quincy Adams, it finally burst, but its forepart remains on display.

Even thou gh much of the land Bartram walked through has changed, laying a hand on this cannon's barrel is a physical connection with his travels in Alabama.

Bartram returned to Georgia in January of 1776. The disruption caused by the Revolution had put an end to his British support, so the following winter he returned home to Philadelphia, in time to spend most of the remainder of the year with his father, who died that fall.

N 1791 BARTRAM fin ally published Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, etc. In it, he described the landscape, flora, fauna, and Indian inhabitants of the region with the eye of an artist, recorded it with the logic of a scientist, and expressed it with the words of a literary master. Fully realizing the ephemeral nature of what he was seeing, he observed and described an unspoiled Alabama before European settlement-a brief look at a vanished landscape and a vanished people: Behold how gracious a11d beneficent smiles the roseate monz I 1zow the su11 arises and fills the plains with light, his glories appear 011 the forests, encompassing the meadows, and gild the top of the terebi11thine Pine and exalted Palms, 110w ge11tly rustling by the pressure of the waking breezes: the music of the seraphic crane resounds in the skies, in separate squadrous they sail, encircling their preci11cts, slowing descend beati11g the dense air, and alight 011 the green dewy verge of the expa11sive lake; its surface yet smoaki11gwith gray ascending mists, which, condmsed aloft

Bartram discovered the giant primrose while on his travels through Alabama. (Courtesy Sterli11g Motton Library, The Morton Arboretum. Photograph by Cathen¡ne Gass.) in clouds of vapor, are bom away by the morning breezes and at last gradually vanish on the distant horizon. All nature awakes to life and activity.

But Bartram had waited too long, at least for Atnericans. His rich style, a mix of scientific and poetic description, and his sympathetic treatment of the Indians, reads better today than at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Unappealing to an energized post-revolutionary public, Travels did not sell well in the United States and was not published there again for over a hundred years.

This is not to say the book was unadmired. In 1851 Thomas Carlyle wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson these words: "Do you know Bartram's 'Travels'? Treats of

Florida chiefly, has a wonderful kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has grown immeasurably old. All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a future biblical article." Though not a popular success, the book made Bartram America's most famous naturalist. But Travels was more popular overseas and was quickly pirated in numerous British and European editions. An interesting travelogue set in exotic America, it influenced a whole generation of European naturalists. Most of them, when they visited America, headed straight for Philadelphia to talk to William Bartram. The book has reportedly never been out of print in the ensuing two hundred years.

Interestingly, Travels became an important influence on the British romantic poets, notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, who appreciated Bartram's sublimist style, his idyllic descriptions of the unspoiled landscape, and his portrait of the Indians as natural man, untainted by degenerate civilization. A vVordsworth poem, "Ruth," even featured Bartram himself as a romantic lover-"a Youth from Georgia's shore" who sported with Indian girls gathering strawberries and spoke "Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam/ Cover a hundred leagues, and seem/To set the hills on fire" (both images straight from Bartram's adventures among the Cherokees in the spring of 1775). Alas, the wild youth, morally suborned by the coarseness of his adventures in America, abandons the innocent Ruth.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge copied portions of Travels into his journal and was clearly influenced by Bartram's dream-like imagery. For example, Bartram's various depictions of fish descending into blue springs in Florida read, "See whole armies descending into an abyss, into the mouth of the bubbling fountain" and "When here arrived, all quiet and peaceable, encircling the little cerulean hemisphere, they descend into the dark caverns of the earth." These descriptions were channeled

by Coleridge in "Kubla Khan," becoming the lines,

Where A/ph the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to ma11 Dow11 to a su11less sea.

NAN AGE BEFORE FIELD GUIDES OR even scientific specialties, William Bartram possessed a remarkable knowledge of the natural world. Though primarily a botanist, he demonstrated a broad interest in other subjects, as well. A great bird enthusiast, Bartram identified more than 215 species of American birds, and did so before binoculars. He named the Florida Sandhill Crane and discovered the Limpkin and a number of other birds for which he never received credit. He alone pointed out that, in addition to the still-present black and turkey vultures, the big black and white king vulture of South America was then present in the Southeast.

In later life, Bartram encouraged and instructed Alexander Wilson, now recognized as the father of American ornithology, in art and bird study. It was Wilson who came up with the idea of selling subscriptions to a proposed book of American bird paintings, a notion later perfected by John James Audubon. But as Elliott Coues said in his 1875 defense of Bartram 's contribution to bird science, "If Wilson be called the 'father of American ornithology,' Bartram then may be styled its god-father."

William Bartram is one of the earliest and most accurate sources on Southeastern Indian life and is one of the few describers of the appearance of eighteenth-century Creek houses and villages. He is also the author of an important 1789 manuscript on Indians, Observatio11s 011 the Creek and Cherokee Indians, which responds at length to questions advanced by his friend Benjamin Smith Barton, professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The manuscript lay unpublished until its rediscovery (in Mobile) and its publication in 1853.

William Bartram was apparently a placid and gentle figure, even to the detriment of his own interests and reputation. With others of his generation, he assumed that European science was superior to his own opinion and sent most of his plants and descriptions back to Britain for verification. At least some of the delay in publishing Travels resulted from his fruitless waiting for London botanists to verify his species' names. Bartram's neglect by European science bears the taint of arro-

gance, even hostility, to the emergence of a vigorous and independent school of American science.

Bartram's twentieth-century student and admirer, Francis Harper, pointed out that Bartram is the actual discoverer of more than two hundred American plants and animals, but that his long delay in publication (1776-1791), and his deference to British science cost him dearly. In the interim, other botanists, some cribbing from Bartram's reports and specimens in Britain, became the first to name his plants. Among his lost credits-although he is the clear discoverer-are cowcumber or big-leaf magnolia, shoals (Cahaba) lily, flame azalea, Fraser magnolia, hooded pitcher plant, yaupon holly, and perhaps twenty-five others.

Today, he is officially credited with naming only about eleven plants and two animals, including the oakleaf hydrangea, gopher tortoise, pyramid magnolia, and giant primrose. He later encouraged young naturalists not to wait on verification from Europe, but to publish first in America, preserving the priority of the plants and animals they named.

In addition to his scientific and literary abilities, Bartram was a remarkable artist. Most of his excellent plant and animal illustrations, many drawn from life in the South, were sent to Dr. Fothergill who distributed them among his friends and other scientists. Although he was not prolific, the work from his mature period is unmatched in American natural history until John James Audubon began to publish in 1827. Today, his paintings and drawings are scattered, mostly in British collections, and remain obscure.

Bartram stayed close to Philadelphia for the rest of his life. As the resident expert at the botanical gardenvisited by Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and James l\Iadison-he became the grand old man of American natural history. Although for many years he was more famous overseas than in the United States, in the end he wielded considerable influence on both science and literature. His book and his dedicated research influenced an entire generation of American and foreign naturalists. He became a major influence on most of the leading figures of the emerging school of American natural history, including Thomas Say, Alexander Wilson, Thomas Nuttall, and Constantine Rafinesque.

William Bartram never married. He finished his life happily with his brother's family in his father's house, tending the gardens until his sudden death at the age of eighty-four on July 22, 1823.

The Lost Camellia The Bartrams discovered many plants, but the discovery of the Franklin tree is by far the most famous . On their 1765 trip to Georgia, John and William were botanizing along the lower Altamaha River, near Fort Barrington. On October 1, they encountered a grove of large unfamiliar shrubs but did not observe fruit or flowers.

In July of 1776, after his return from Alabama, William Bartram revisited the spot and found the plants in bloom. Realizing that it was a previously unknown member of the tea family, he described it in detail in Travels and named it Frank/inio o/atamoho after Benjamin Franklin. Throughout his life, it was one of the few plants for which he insisted on receiving credit.

Bartram's illustration of it in flower-probably his most well-known painting-was featured on a 1999 stamp commemorating the Bartrams.

By 1783, Bartram's garden advertised Franklinia in its catalog, but plant collectors went to work on the natural population. The Barrington grove of Frankli11ia was last seen growing in 1803. Despite two centuries of effort, the plant has never been found in the wild again. It is thought that all living examples of Franklin's camellia are grown from seeds brought back to Bartram's garden in 1777.

The Giant Primrose Early o1le monzi1lg,passing along by some old uncultivated fields, a few miles above Toensa, I was struck with surprise ot the oppeoranee of o bloomi11g plant, gilded with the richest golden yellow. Steppi11g on shore, I discovered it to be o new species ofthe Oenothera . .. perhops the most pompous and brilliant herbaceous plant yet known to exist.

-Bartram's Travels

m 1791, preservmg Bartram's right to name the plant. Bartram painted the Giant Primrose from sketches of pressed flowers he gathered in Alabama; he likely completed the work in Savannah after his return.

Oak Leaf Hydrangea I observed here o very singular ot1d beautiful shrub, which I suppose is a species of Hydrangio (H. quercifolia). It grows in coppices or clumps near or on the bonks of rivers and creeks: many stems usually arise from a root, ... and ore covered with several barks or rinds the lost of which bei11g of o cinereous dirt color and ve1~y thin.

-Bartram's Travels

Hyperbole aside, the giant primrose, Oenothero grondifloro, i a dandy plant.

This large herb, sometimes more than nine feet high, lives only in the three or four counties east of the Mobile Delta.

Large ones are Christmas-tree-shaped, with big yellow flowers. The giant primrose is similar So impressed was Barto smaller and more tram with his discovery The Alabama Legislotureji11olly adopted Bot1rom's Oak widespread yellow primLeaf Hydrangea as the State Wildflower in 1999, after years that he spent most of a rose , but its sheer size page describing it in deof lobbying by the Alabama !Vildflower Society. tail. He must have made renders it outstanding.

(Photouroph by Robin JliJcDonold) careful drawings in the William Bartram reports it with blooms as much as five inches in diameter. field and probably collected a specimen, because an accurate engraving of it appears in Tim;els.

Giant primroses live in old fields and ditches, reachMeaning no particular disrespect for the camellia (iging their greatest size in moist, fertile soil. Like all primroses, each day at dusk new blossoms rapidly noring the fact that it is not native to the Western Hemi(even visibly) open and fill the air with fragrance. You sphere, much less Alabama), the oak leaf hydrangea is a can still see the flowers in all their glory early in the much better choice for the State Flower. William Bartram discovered Hydro11gea quercifolia in central Geormorning, but by noon they fold and turn orange and limp. With small-field agriculture on the decline and gia on July 4, 1775, while on his journey to Alabama.

Known locally as "seven-bark" for its peculiar papery the common use of herbicides along the edges of roads, the giant primrose is becoming rarer in the wild, but it bark, it grows naturally throughout Alabama and Georgia can still be found in gardens, especially among the and is planted widely elsewhere. This large and beautifancier ones in south Alabama. ful shrub is so common in Alabama that we forget what a regional specialty it is. After years of pressure by the The rarity and remoteness of the giant primrose prevented someone else from naming it until Travels, with Alabama Wildflower Society, the Alabama Legislature finally adopted it as the State Wildflower in 1999. AH its careful technical description, finally made it to print

THE LESS THINGS CHANGE: CHARLES BROOKS AND THE ART OF ALABAMA POLITICS

By James L. Baggett

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AMES L. BAGGETI is head of the Department of Archives and ~1anuscripts at the Birmingham Public Library and Archivist for the City of Birmingham.

The author wi he to thank Charles Brooks, Yolanda Valentin, and Regina Ammon for their assistance in the preparation of this article. In 1998 Charles Brooks donated more than 3,800 of his original cartoons to the archives of the Birmingham Public Library. This collection forms the ba is for two exhibitions of Brooks's work to be on display at the Birmingham Public Library during March and April2004. For additional information on these exhibitions contact the author at jbaggerr@bham.lib.al.us or 205226-3631.

Readers wishing tO learn more should consult the book Best of Brooks (Birmingham, Ala.: EBSCO Media, 1986), edited by Charles G. Brooks Jr. Among the several good hisrories of political cartooning, the author recommends Them Damned Pictures ( orrh Haven, Conn.: Archon Books, 1996) by Roger A. Fischer, and Editorial and Political Cartooni11g( ew York: Srravon Educational Press, 1976) by Syd Hoff.

ALABAMA AND WORLD WAR ONE: THE GOLD STAR COLLECTION

By Sam Duvall AM DUVALL works as Communications DirectOr for the Alabama Forestry Association, where he publishes the quarterly magazine Alabama Forests, various forest industry newsletters, and other non-deadline publications. His article on Civil War Colonel Daniel Shipman Troy appeared in Alabama Heritage :f:63. His first article for Alabama Heritage on World War II fighter pilot Ray Davis appeared in Alabama Heritage 459.

Duvall would like tO thank Dr. Ed Bridges, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and Hisrory, for introducing him to the Gold Star Collection, for reading the srory and making constructive suggestions, and for providing copies from the Gold Star files for the story. Thanks are also due ro archives staff members Ken Tilley and Or. Norwood Kerr for their direct help in securing phorographs and copie of information for the Gold Star srory and ro Dr. Kerr for proofreading the finished article. In April 2004, the archives plans tO post the names of all Gold Star soldiers on its web sire (http://-.vww.archives.state.al.us).

For further reading about "The Grear War," the author suggests: Barbara Tuchman's Gu11s of August (1 ew York: McMillan Publishing Company,1962), john Keegan's The First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; Distributed by Random House,1999), and WinstOn Groom's A Storm In Flanders ( ew York: Atlantic Monthly Pre s, 2002).

S

WILLIAM BARTRAM: FIRST SCIENTIST OF ALABAMA

By Joh11 C. Hall

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OHN HALL, retired from the Alabama .M useum of Natural History, is still active as a Research Associate. A frequent contributor tO Alabama Heritage, Hall has written on Hernando DeSoto, state geologist Eugene Allen Smith, and Alabama meteorites. Currently he is working on a "lost landscapes" project-what Alabama looked like at the beginning of the historic period-and is gathering material for a piece on the myth of Prince ~ladoc.

For those intere red in pursuing William Bartram, Hall suggest visiting the Bartram Trail Conference web site, www. bartramtrail.org, which has links to many Bartram-relared sites, including Historic Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia. He recommends the following book : The Travels ofWilliam Bartram edited and annotated by Francis Harper (University of Georgia Press, 1998), Waselkov and Braund's William Battram 011 the Southeastern f11dians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), and Brad Sanders's Guide to Bartram's Travels (Athens, Ga: F everrree Press, 2002).

LILLIAN GOODNER: QUEEN OF THE SEPIAS

By Marc Bankert ARC L. BANKERT, a native of lontgomery, Alabama, worked in entertainment and education. He is now organizing an exhibit of Lillian Goodner's photograph collection of performers of the '20s and '30s. He also plans to write a book about Lillian Goodner's life and rimes.

Bankert welcomes information from those who have knowledge of Lillian, her family, or the friends in her photographs. He is searching for one of Lillian's niece -<laughter of joe Paige and sister of jazz singer lay Knott-who is believed to live in Minneapolis or St. Paul, Minne ota. He wou ld also like tO hear from relatives of other entertainers from the '20s and '30s.

You can contact Bankert at 2133 Meadowlane Drive, 1\lontgomery, AL 3610 1 or 334-834- 1578 or mlbankerr@yahoo.com.

For further reading, Bankert suggests: Bernard L. Peterson's A Centwy ofAlusicals in Black and White (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), Henry Sampson's Blacks i11 Blackface (Metuchen, .j.: Scarecrow Press, 1980), and Allen \Voll's Black Musical Theatre (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer iry Press, 1989).

M

E!Tata On page 12 of the Fall is ue (1=70), please note that Bert Bank was in pilot training, but did not receive his pi lor's license before his capture in the Philippines. Also, on page 25, a photograph identified as Crossvi lle is actua lly Collinsvi lle.

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