When Sarah Haynsworth’s family settled on the Alabama frontier, it was quite an unruly place, still a territory and marked by wars between settlers and the Native Americans they displaced, and ruled largely by the violence and wildness of the American southwest. Her marriage to John Gayle allowed Sarah to experience life at the center of Alabama’s early statehood. Thanks to her diaries—many composed in Sarah’s long stretches of isolation while John, one of Alabama’s early governors, traveled—we have a lively and poignant understanding of life in this violent and often lonely time. Sarah’s journals offer a rare and sensitive glimpse of the opportunities and challenges faced by the state of Alabama’s first women settlers.
Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins is professor emerita of history at the University of Alabama, a past president of the Alabama Historical Association, and editor of the Alabama Review for twenty years. She is the author or editor of several books.
