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THE TOWN
The town was probably incorporated in the 1820s/30s. Most of the area would have been razed during the Civil War, and rebuilt during Reconstruction, in the late 1860s. Much of the architecture is in the Carpenter Gothic style, popular in the late 19th century. The Gothic style of the architecture evokes images of a time past - the romance and chivalry of medieval Europe, from which the Southern gentry had always drawn inspiration. However, since the style was mostly confined to buildings such as houses and small churches, it emphasised charm and quaintness rather than the more imposing big stone buildings of old Europe.
A plantation a little way outside of town is still occupied by a frail old lady, the last of her line. Most of the rooms have been closed off for many years, and the place is falling into a state of general dilapidation. The cotton fields were sold off to settle debts after the civil war, divided up and farmed by sharecroppers. However with the Great Migration to the cities of the north during the first decades of the 20th century, and the mechanization of agriculture in the 1940s, few tenant farmers remain.
The town centre itself is small, consisting of a general store and a couple of other shops, post office, bank, courthouse/jail, local paper, a couple of restaurants, a church, and other amenities to be found in a town of this size. A map of a similar (probably recognizable) town from which I have drawn inspiration is here. The courthouse is a building made of brick with Doric columns, and is the only surviving building from before the Civil War. The church was destroyed but a new one was built on exactly the same site. There is no train station at the town, but buses go to Birmingham a couple of times a day.
The African-American quarter of town presents a stark contrast to the wide, neat main streets lined with magnolia trees. Here the houses are far smaller, and house many more people, often with three generations living under the same roof in no more than two or three rooms. The community is extremely close-knit, and is centered around the church, belonging to the National Baptist Convention and sharing its minister with a couple of other nearby small towns.
On the outskirts of town live poor white families, many of them in as bad or worse squalor than the African-Americans, who look down on them as much as the white townsfolk do.
