Cahaba, Alabama

Cahaba - Cahawba on the older maps - was Alabama's first permanent state capital, laid out on empty ground where the Cahaba river meets the Alabama and abandoned within a lifetime. It has one ghost story with a traceable origin, and it is smaller and better documented than the version usually told. In the spring of 1862 a young couple walking into the cedar maze of Colonel C. C. Pegues's garden saw a large white luminous ball floating a few feet above the path; it dodged the man's hand and vanished. Anna M. Gayle Fry printed the account in 1908 and recorded what the town concluded: a will-o'-the-wisp. The colonel was alive when it appeared, and was mortally wounded at Gaines's Mill that June. The lights in the ruins and the voices in the empty streets belong to the ghost tours the Alabama Historical Commission has co-run for seventeen years, not to the record. What the record does hold is a Confederate prison flooded to the roosts in March 1865, survivors who died on the Sultana seven weeks later, and a Black community that turned the ruined courthouse into a Reconstruction stronghold.

Cahaba was not a town that grew into a capital. It was a capital ordered into existence on an empty point of land, and everything that happened afterwards followed from that decision. In 1818 the territorial assembly fixed Alabama's seat of government at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers, before there was a city there. Linda Derry, the site's director and senior archaeologist, describes what Governor William Wyatt Bibb then did with it: "He got this land, free of charge from the federal government, was given to the new state of Alabama on which to build their capital city. He designed it, he surveyed it, he auctioned it off and all the money went in to create Alabama's state treasury. So really, the state of Alabama owes Cahawba a big debt because it financed our government." The boom was violent and short. Anna M. Gayle Fry, who grew up in the town and published her memoir of it in 1908, records that by 1820 Cahaba had two newspapers, a land office, a state bank, stores, boarding houses, hotels and schools. In 1822 public land around the town went under the hammer at $1.25 an acre and was worth $60 to $70 an acre within weeks; unimproved lots in the centre reportedly reached $5,025, and the sale of 184 lots brought in more than $120,000, which was added to the money the legislature had set aside for public buildings. The capitol itself was a square two-storey brick block under a dome, with the executive and state offices either side of a broad central hall and the Senate and House in two large rooms upstairs. Why the capital left is genuinely disputed, and the dispute matters more than the answer. Fry gives the story every later account repeats: in 1825 "the largest flood ever known in the history of this country" swept down both rivers and inundated the town; according to tradition, she says, the legislature was in session and members had to be rowed in boats and landed on the second storey of the capitol; part of the Statehouse fell, and the next legislature, meeting in January 1826, moved the capital to Tuscaloosa. The Encyclopedia of Alabama dates the removal effective 1 February 1826 and notes that its proponents cited flooding and health. Derry, who has excavated the place for decades, rejects the flood outright: "1825 was a drought year, there was some high water, but the town was never inundated. Those stories were blown out of proportion by the press, in the newspapers, editors of the newspapers of the Tuscaloosa, Montgomery and Huntsville newspapers. And of course we know why they did that, it's because they were competing for the state capital." Losing the capital did not kill Cahaba. Cotton and the river rebuilt it: by 1860 the town had, according to Alabama Public Radio's account of the site, the fourth-highest per capita wealth in the United States, and that wealth was cotton and slavery. The Alabama Historical Commission's own account is blunter still: by 1860, 64 per cent of Cahawba's population was African American, and the surviving records overwhelmingly reflect the white minority who owned the newspapers and held the offices. In 1863 a cotton warehouse in the middle of the town was turned into the Cahaba Federal Prison, known unofficially as Castle Morgan. It was built for roughly 500 men and at its peak held more than 3,000; about 5,000 passed through it and 147 died, a rate just under three per cent against more than thirty per cent at Andersonville. Its worst week is dated precisely because a prisoner wrote it down: Jesse Hawes, a Union surgeon held there, records that on the early afternoon of 1 March 1865 the river entered the stockade, that by midnight there was no dry spot anywhere, and that on the morning of Monday 2 March he and several sergeants asked the commander, Colonel Sam Jones, to march the men to higher ground. Jones answered: "Not so long as there is a G-d d-d Yankee's head above water can you come out of that stockade." Hawes prints a fellow prisoner's account, by Ira F. Collins, of how it ended: the water began to fall on the fifth day, drained on the seventh, and normal conditions were restored on the tenth. Freedom killed many of the survivors. Former Cahaba prisoners boarded the steamboat Sultana at Vicksburg on 24 April 1865; her boilers exploded near Memphis on 27 April, and around 800 of the 1,700 to 1,800 dead were men who had come out of Castle Morgan. The town's civil death came in 1866, when, in Fry's words, "by a vote of the people of the county, the courthouse was removed to Selma" and Cahaba ceased for the first time to be the seat of Dallas County. What happened next is the part our own file had omitted entirely. The half-ruined courthouse became a meeting place for freedmen consolidating the gains of Reconstruction, and Selma coined a nickname for the place in derision: the "Mecca of the Radical Republican Party". Cahawba's Black residents supplied Jordan Hatcher, the town's postmaster and a delegate to the constitutional convention; Tom Walker, one of Alabama's first Black state legislators, later a lawyer in Washington and a trustee of Howard University; and Jeremiah Haralson, born in 1846, the only African American to sit in the Alabama House, the Alabama Senate and the United States House of Representatives. Ezekel Arthur, a freedman, bought the Fambro House, which his family kept until the state acquired it. By 1870 the whole town numbered 431 people, 302 of them Black. After that it emptied for good. Fry, looking back from 1908, writes that in the eighteen-seventies "for the third time within the memory of man, the town became a deserted village", with the business houses locked and grass in the principal streets. By 1900 most of the buildings had burned, rotted or been dismantled and carried away. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and passed to the Alabama Historical Commission in 1975, which runs it today as Old Cahawba Archaeological Park. Some of what was carried off has come back: St Luke's Episcopal Church, a Carpenter Gothic building put up on Vine Street in 1854 and moved to Martin's Station in 1878, was returned to Cahaba in 2006-2007 and restored by 2010. It is the building in the photograph on this file.

Old Cahawba is a public archaeological park run by the Alabama Historical Commission, at 9518 Cahaba Road, Orrville, Alabama 36767, telephone 334-872-8058. From Selma take AL-22 west for nine miles, turn left on County Road 9 for five miles, then left on County Road 2 into the park. The grounds are open daily from 9:00 to 17:00 and the visitor centre from 10:00 to 16:30, Thursday to Monday; the park closes on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Admission is $2 for adults and $1 for children aged 6 to 18 accompanied by a parent, with an annual pass at $25 individual or $35 family. Active-duty military personnel and their families enter free between Armed Forces Day and Labor Day under the Blue Star Museums scheme. Walking tours and step-on bus tours are $8, a basic two-hour wagon tour is $10 for adults and $8 for under-18s, an extended tour is $15 and workshops are $25 a day; all guided tours are by appointment and must be booked at least two weeks ahead. These figures come from the Commission's own pages as published in 2024 and 2025 and should be confirmed by telephone before travelling. Most of the site is walked or cycled: there are five miles of level roads and a limited number of cruiser bikes lent free with paid admission against a valid driving licence. The visitor centre and lavatories are accessible, there are wheelchair-accessible picnic tables, and the Clear Creek nature trail is fully accessible. Bring a hat, sun cream and insect repellent - this is open country beside a river. Two rules matter more than the rest. Old Cahawba is an archaeological preserve: no metal detecting and no digging. And no visitor may be on the grounds after dark except during special events - which means that the only lawful way to see the ruins at night is to buy a ticket for the Haunted History Tours, held on two Saturday evenings in late October, $25 per person, advance booking by telephone, ages 12 and up, mostly by wagon with some walking on uneven ground. What you will not find here is the ghost story this file used to describe. The one documented sighting happened in a private cedar maze that no longer exists, and the garden it stood in is now a lawn.