Archaeological Survey of the Old Federal Road in Alabama

To give readers a feel for the enthusiasm and affection our guides display for their particularportion of the Old Federal Road, and how a ride down the road can conjure memories both collective andpersonal, we include here a summary of observations offered us by Annie Crenshaw, Eric Cates, andGerald Johnson in northern Butler County on November 17, 2010. Annie, our host who organized theday’s explorations, introduced us to these two gentlemen, and the five of us drove up and down StateHighway 185 that afternoon. All of our guides have strong historical and personal ties to the county andeach contributed immensely to our survey. Mr. Cates was then 92 years old, born in 1918 about 200 yardsfrom where he lives now. We met him at the Fort Dale Cemetery where we gathered around the grave ofThomas Gary, who built a stockade for the protection of settlers in 1818. “I think he built a fort andcharged people to come in,” mused Eric, to which Annie replied, “He was an enterprising man.” We thenheaded north on Highway 185 toward the Lowndes County line.Churches and cemeteries are thick on the ground in this area. Just beyond a well-preserved,entrenched section of the Old Federal Road we passed Oak Grove Baptist Church, built duringReconstruction in 1872, which prompted Eric to recollect “about two miles further up … when I was akid there was a Baptist Church there named Indian Creek, Indian Creek Baptist Church. I remember itquite well because my grandmother was a member of that church and I had been to services there when Iwas a kid.” We passed the Hartley family cemetery, although their house no longer stands. “The thing thatconvinced me,” Eric said, “that [Highway] 185 is on the site, the original site, of the Old Federal Road isthat a lot of the old houses that are no longer there, but were there when I was a kid, were along this road,along this same road. And I know they were built there because it was a road. They were on both sides ofthe road.” Annie joined in. “They were built facing the road, on both sides of the road. And there werehouses, like the Palings, that were a hundred-fifty years old when me and Eric’s daughter, who playedtogether in first grade all the way up, when we were little. I was born the year the Palings burned [in1953]. There were still old 1820s and 1830s houses all up and down the road. I mean you knew it was anold road because there were log cabins and dogtrots all up and down it.” Eric continued, “When I was akid, there was several of those houses up here that had been occupied for two or three generations, thatwere old houses then. They are gone.”The old roadbed diverges at many points through here from the modern road. “See, this road[State Highway 185] was originally US Highway 31,” Eric said. “It was the first hard surface roadthrough this whole area of Alabama. And they didn’t have too much equipment at that time to, you know,to do big grades. This is a crooked road. The reason it’s so crooked is it follows the ridgeline. People didnot have the means of building bridges and making fills and making cuts through hills, so they followedthe ridgeline.” Now we were amidst old settlements. In rapid succession, Eric pointed out the old Gafford245