Sturdivant Hall

Sturdivant Hall was finished in 1856 for the cotton planter Edward T. Watts: six thirty-foot Corinthian columns with cast-iron capitals across a sixty-foot front, and no surviving document that names the enslaved people who built it. Its ghost is said to be John McGee Parkman, who bought the house in 1864 and at twenty-eight was president of the First National Bank of Selma. When the bank lost government deposits in cotton speculation, General Wager Swayne seized it and arrested him. The story usually told — that he was shot as he ran home to Sturdivant Hall — cannot have happened: the jail was at Cahaba, almost thirteen kilometres away. What the Selma Times printed the next day is stranger. On 23 May 1867 he bolted from the jail hall, ran seventy-five yards to the Alabama River with the jailer firing, swam, reached the paddle wheel of the steamer Gertrude while passengers watched, and went under. The paper called it suicide; the wires called it drowning; when the body surfaced a week later, the wound was a gunshot. The earliest printed ghost story is from 1969.

The house came first and the ghost arrived a century later. Both are better documented than the version that circulates online, and neither says what that version says. The lot, the builder, and the people the record leaves out On 19 April 1852 Colonel Edward T. Watts, a cotton planter, bought a corner lot bounded by Mabry and Union streets and McLeod Avenue at a public sale for $1,830. What he wanted, according to the museum's own history page, was a house "in town" for entertaining guests. Work ran from 1853 to 1856 under Thomas Helm Lee of Selma, a cousin of Robert E. Lee, and cost around $69,000. What Lee produced was a brick house rendered in stucco and scored to imitate ashlar stone. Six fluted Corinthian columns thirty feet high stand across a sixty-foot front, their capitals cast in iron rather than carved, behind a lace-work iron balcony that runs the whole length of the porch. Four windows to each floor have hinged panels below the sills so the sashes can be used as doors. The roof is hipped, with three chimneys and a small cupola windowed on every side. Inside, a T-shaped hall divides both floors; the drawing room measures twenty by thirty feet and its cornice carries large plaster rosettes spaced widely at the bottom and tiny ones crowded at the top; a straight-run stair serves the bedrooms and a spiral stair winds around a central post up to the cupola. The 1972 nomination that put the house on the National Register compared it to the Natchez mansions, and to Stanton Hall in particular. Artisans brought from Italy did the plaster and the marble. Here is what the record does not say. The nomination form names Watts, names Lee, gives the price and the comparison, and stops. The Encyclopedia of Alabama adds the Italian plasterers. Neither names — nor even mentions — the enslaved people who built a Greek Revival mansion for a cotton planter in Dallas County in the middle of the 1850s. That silence is not a convention of the genre: Alabama's own regional tourism service says plainly of Lyon Hall in Demopolis that it was "constructed between 1850-1853 by slaves of George Gaines". For Sturdivant Hall every source I have been able to read is silent, and the honest thing is to name the gap rather than fill it with invented names. The banker Watts moved to Texas and on 12 February 1864 sold the house for $65,000 to John McGee Parkman, born in Selma on 12 January 1838. Parkman had climbed from dry goods to clerk, bookkeeper, teller and cashier, and in 1866 — at twenty-eight — he was made president of the First National Bank of Selma, a newly organised institution with $100,000 of capital and large deposits of United States government money. The bank went into cotton speculation, which the museum's own account calls "a common error of the times", and lost. What happened next is unusually well recorded, because the Selma Times printed a full account on 24 May 1867 that Northern papers reprinted within the week. On 15 April 1867 some $160,000 was said to have been stolen from the bank; the next day Parkman advertised a reward in the city papers for its recovery. On 17 April General Wager Swayne, the senior Federal officer in the state, took possession of the bank and its deposits on behalf of the government and placed the president under military arrest. The following morning Parkman escaped from his own residence, where he was being held under guard, and took the Cahaba road on horseback. Swayne offered $1,500 for him. He was captured in Wilcox County on the 19th, brought back to Selma, and lodged the next day in the county jail at Cahaba, twelve and a half kilometres downriver from the house he had bought three years earlier. Twenty-three May 1867 At about sunset on 23 May the prisoners were assembled in the hall of the jail when the jailer opened the door. Parkman rushed out and made for the Alabama River, "about seventy five yards distant". The jailer fired at him as he ran and he was seen to fall; he got up, reached the water and struck out swimming. The steamer Gertrude lay some twenty yards below the point where he entered the river, and a party of ladies and gentlemen on board watched the whole thing. He went under once or twice as he was carried down towards the boat. Efforts were made to save him. He reached the paddle wheel, which was not turning, held on for a moment "stifled and exhausted", then sank beneath the boat and was not seen again. He left a widow, Sarah J. Norris, and two small daughters, Emily Norris Parkman and Maria Hunter Parkman. The Selma paper, which knew him, asked that "his errors in the closing scenes of his bank" be attributed "to his youth and ambition, and not to any mature fraudulent intentions". The telegraph flattened all of that into one line that ran from Mobile on 24 May and was printed from Alexandria to Baton Rouge: Parkman "escaped yesterday, plunged into the river and drowned himself". The Selma Times had already run it under a blunter heading: "The Selma Bank Robbery — Suicide of the President, John M. Parkman". Then the body came back. On 30 May 1867 the Selma Messenger reported that it had been recovered the previous day about fifteen miles below Cahaba and brought up to the city, and that a gentleman who saw it said the appearances "all indicated that he came to his death from a gun shot wound", the ball entering near the spine on the left side, in the lumbar region, and passing out just above the navel. Three weeks later a separate wire told a different story: the remains were found about a mile above White Bluff, Alabama, and the vultures had disfigured them. I have not been able to reconcile the two reports from the sources I read. Afterwards Parkman's widow and daughters stayed on until January 1870, when the estate went at auction for $12,500 to Emile Gillman, a Selma merchant. The Gillman family kept it until the autumn of 1957, when the City of Selma bought it for $75,000: $50,000 came from the estate of Robert Daniel Sturdivant, whose will provided for a museum, and the city council and the Dallas County Board of Revenue put in $12,500 each. The house therefore carries the name of a man who never lived in it. It was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1934–35 and listed on the National Register on 18 January 1973, on a form signed by W. Warner Floyd of the Alabama Historical Commission. The ghost is younger than the museum. The earliest printed telling I have been able to date is "The Return of the Ruined Banker", a chapter in 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey by Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh, published in Huntsville in 1969 — a hundred and two years after the death, and twelve years after the house opened to visitors. It opens on a guided tour, with somebody insisting that "Parkman's ghost is right here in Sturdivant Hall!"

Sturdivant Hall is at 713 Mabry Street, Selma, Alabama 36701, inside the Old Town Historic District, which is the largest historic district in the state. The long-standing telephone number printed in guidebooks is (334) 872-5626. The Encyclopedia of Alabama, whose entry was last revised in January 2024, gives opening hours of Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a tour that takes in the house, the detached kitchen — now the gift shop — and the formal garden, and states that admission charges and fundraising events pay for the upkeep. Check before you travel, and check by telephone. Two things make the published information unreliable. First, on 12 January 2023 an EF2 tornado went through Selma's historic district. Sturdivant Hall lost windows to flying debris and most of the old live oaks on its lawn, and museum coordinator Mary Margret Mims told the Selma Times-Journal two days later that "it is amazing the house survived the storm" and that the museum was closed until further notice while the structure was repaired and the grounds cleared. I have not been able to date the reopening from any source I could read. Second, the museum's old web address, sturdivanthall.com, is no longer the museum's: as of 14 August 2026 it resolves to an unrelated foreign gambling page. Do not use it, do not trust hours scraped from it, and be wary of aggregator sites that still list it. The house is a two-storey antebellum mansion and its upper floors are reached by stairs only — a straight-run stair to the bedrooms and a spiral stair winding around a central post to the cupola. I could find no accessibility statement published by the museum. Next door at 811 Mabry Street stands White-Force Cottage, an Italianate house of 1858-59 that belonged to Martha Todd White, a half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln; it has long been shown in connection with Sturdivant Hall. The site of the story itself is elsewhere: Old Cahawba Archaeological Park, about thirteen kilometres away, preserves the vanished town where Parkman was jailed and died. The museum has rented the house and grounds for weddings and receptions for decades, and it has featured in the Historic Selma Pilgrimage since 1975; I found no ghost tour advertised by the institution.