Published in September of 1922 in the Montgomery Advisor out
of Montgomery, AL
CONSERVING
OUR HISTORY
It took Alabama about a hundred years to
show any special interest in its own history, but of late its people have been
concerned over the preservation and teaching of that history. This modern
movement for marking historic sites and stimulating in various ways the study
of Alabama history was led by Dr. Thomas M. Owen and his work as the head of
the Department of History and is being carried on by that department.
It is now being fostered by the Centennial
Commission of which Governor Kilby is chairman and Mrs. Thomas M. Owen now head
of the Department of History, is secretary.
The unveiling exercises attendant upon the
setting up of a boulder, with a suitable inscription at St. Stephens, is one of
a number of series of historic occasions of that character. Boulders or
monuments have been erected at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff on the Alabama river,
marking the rite of the first settlement in Alabama, a site which preceded but
was merged into the establishment of the city of Mobile. Then a monument was
erected at Old Fort Toulouse, nine miles from Montgomery at the junction of the
Alabama and Coosa rivers, designating the site occupied by a garrison from 1715
to 1760 by the French, when it was taken over by the English. This is a point
of significant importance in the State’s history, reminding us that Alabama was
once colonial territory, its fate decided by a battle between French and
British armies on the plains of Abraham, overlooked by the walls of Quebec.
Into the same fort, dismantled even on
this day, Andrew Jackson marched his victorious riflemen after the battle of
Horseshoe Bend in 1814. There he summoned the Creek chiefs and forced them to
sign a treaty which gave most, but not all, the lands of the Indians to the
white settlers.
Old
Hickory was frankly an “imperialist” and untroubled by modern theories of the
consent of the governed and the rights of small nations. He held to the crude
practice followed by soldiers of every age, that when your enemy fought you and
tried to kill you that he owed a penalty if he did not succeed. Moreover, the white settlers wanted to come
in and cultivate the unused lands that were occupied by the Indians.
The Centennial Commission in commemorating
events which fell in and around centenary of Alabama’s birthday put up last
year an inscribed boulder to mark the site of the first capitol building at
Cahaba. St. Stephens was never the capital after the government of the State
was organized. It was the capital of the Territory of Alabama. All these events
have revived interest and stimulated study of Alabama history and all help to
conserve the history of the State.
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