SATURDAY TOURS
SATURDAY AFTERNOON TOURS AT OLD CAHAWBA Cahawba’s “Negro Burial Ground” – A Guided Walking Tour The Black Belt African American Historical and Genealogical Society will host a tour of a place identified on historic maps of Cahawba as the “Negro Burial Ground.” This cemetery was probably created in 1819 to be a slave cemetery, but African-Americans continued to use this graveyard after emancipation. Most of the gravestones mark the graves of people who were born into slavery, including members of Jordan Hatcher’s family. Hatcher was a member of Alabama’s 1868 Constitutional Convention. Although the cemetery only contains a few headstones, the many sunken graves indicate that hundreds of people are buried here. This is not surprising since the population of antebellum Cahawba was at least 60% African-American. Cahawba’s “New” Cemetery – A Guided Walking Tour Dr. Valerie Burnes, University of West Alabama, will introduce you to the diverse residents that once called Cahawba home on this walking tour of Cahawba’s “New” Cemetery, created in 1851. Each grave marker tells a story. And although this cemetery was badly vandalized in the 1960s, the artistry of two talented Cahawba stone carvers can still be admired. If you ask her, Dr. Burnes may even tell you a few ghost stories associated with this mysterious place.
“Hear the Dead Speak” – A Guided Walking Tour Linda Derry, the director of the Old Cahawba Archaeological Park, invites you to become an “aboveground archaeologist” on this tour. She will help you discover messages in Cahawba’s relic landscape that were left behind by the town’s long dead residents. You will find messages that were intentionally left for us to read, and some that were unintentional, and even some that require a translator. The walk will reveal clues about a 19th-century poet, antebellum gardens, a railroad, Alabama’s first statehouse, an Indian village, a Civil War prison, and much more. Old Cahawba Wagon Tour Jonathan Matthews, the assistant site director at Old Cahawba, will be your guide on this wagon tour of the town site. This is the best way to appreciate Governor Bibb’s town plan as you travel from one end of this ghost town to the other. Along the way, you will be shown pictures of missing structures and see some of Cahawba’s main attractions, like the Crocheron columns, the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama Rivers, the Fambro House, the Methodist Church ruins, and the famous Perine Well.
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