LEE COUNTY: Part 1
Did we say forty? Yep. That’s twenty this month and twenty next. Even then, we wouldn’t begin to suggest that every cool Lee County sight, sound, and story could be contained in a magazine, let alone a list of forty, but here are a few things every Lee Countian ought to know, visit, or brag about. Have some nominations of your own? Drop us a line at editor@lee-magazine.com.
1 Wild, Wild, Wild Opelika
Opelika’s history sometimes sounds like an outtake from a cowboy film, or maybe a missing scene from Gangs of New York. Why the city spent the latter part of the nineteenth century hosting regular shoot-em-ups isn’t clear. But it managed to repeatedly make the New York Times in 1882 and 1883 with two simultaneously serving mayors, rival tavern keepers — one of them was a mayor — nightly gunfights and rioting. Coach passengers traveling through town were told to hit the deck or risk a stray bullet. The Alabama Legislature grew weary of the city’s problems and revoked Opelika’s charter around the time one of the saloon-keeping rivals died in a gunfight. The governor sent state muscle to enforce calm. Later, when the state finally restored Opelika’s charter, a return to respectability was not immediate. City officials issued fake railroad bonds in an attempted scam.
So that’s something to chew on when you visit the Railroad Avenue Historic District. Here’s a place where the history sticks to your ribs. The South Railroad Avenue area was a hotbed of saloons and brothels in the late 1800s. It’s changed a bit. The original commercial district burned in 1868. Most of the construction of the 105 buildings in the historic district took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
2 The Harvest
Feeling ambitious? There are at least three Lee County farms where you can harness your energy in the gathering of fresh produce.
Blueberries.
Billy Allen, whose farm at 2906 Old Columbus Road, Opelika, has offered u-pick blueberries and muscadines for about a dozen years. He says the blueberries should be ready by mid-June.
Ed Jacobs says you can come in and pick your own butterbeans and peas at his Pic N Pay Vegetable Farm at 1270 Lee Road 47, Opelika. The butterbeans should be ready in July. He also sells other produce and nursery stock, but you don’t get to pick those yourself.
The folks at Randle Farms, 9215 Lee Road 54, Auburn, also have blueberries for the picking Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. until dark. The farm also sells other produce and honey.
3 What the Governor Never Said and the Day He Didn’t Say It
The Auburn citizens who proposed a church-sponsored institute of higher learning to the Methodist Convention in 1854 weren’t spoiling for a fight. But that’s what they got. Come back with $100,000 for an endowment, church authorities told community leaders, then we’ll talk. That challenge set up a competition Auburn hadn’t counted on. The west Alabama community of Greensboro thought it made a better home for the school. It put its greater resources to work to sway the Methodist Convention into its arms, explains historian Ralph Brown Draughon Jr. He told the story two years ago at the university’s sesquicentennial celebration. Draughon says a newspaper battle followed Greensboro’s declaration of intentions. Auburn clearly had the moral advantage, an Auburn newspaper editor declared, making it a far more suitable place for the shaping of young minds. The streets of Auburn were without drunkenness, fistfights, Sabbath-breaking, and swearing, the editor wrote. Indeed, he never even witnessed loafing. Whereas Greensboro was a hotbed of intemperance, he declared, where a dram shot of liquor was consumed for every 266 persons.
Auburn successfully collected pledges for $112,000 in time for the next Methodist Convention, but it wasn’t enough. Greensboro pledged $168,000, and won the Methodist sponsorship. That didn’t stop Auburnites. They approached the Alabama legislature for a charter. The legislature approved it, but Gov. John A. Winston vetoed the measure, as he vetoed all educational charters. The legislature quickly overrode the veto. Oddly, history records the governor praising the new college: “I predict great success for East Alabama Male College. I am sure it will be a great influence for good in your section of the state.” Auburn University includes the quote on its sesquicentennial website. But the governor said no such thing. Vetoing governors seldom praise acts approved over their veto. Draughon calls the quote “completely and totally historically inaccurate.” In fact, the historian said, Auburnites celebrating the university’s centennial fabricated the quote for a dramatic production in 1956. Oh, one more correction Draughon offers to the record: The legislature overrode the veto February 7 — which means that Auburn’s celebration of Founders Day on February 1 is a week premature.
The school opened in the autumn of 1858 with eighty students. But while enrollment rose the second year, the Civil War soon changed everything. By 1864, trade goods were scarce due to the Northern blockade, Confederate dollars worthless or nearly so, and war-wounded languished all over town. The school’s main building was now the Texas Hospital, so named because of that state’s practice of subsidizing the medical care of its soldiers. The injured were the overflow of a beleaguered Atlanta. Some four hundred men from Texas and other states came to the Auburn school and surrounding churches for care, Draughon said. That same year, a tornado battered the city, damaging buildings and killing several. At the Baptist church, a near-miracle saved the wounded from further injury in the storm. Men there reclined on high-backed wooden pews. When a tornado blew the church roof in, the pews held it above the injured soldiers like a tent.
Despite this drama during its infancy, the school struggled on. In 1872, it became the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. In 1899, the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and, in 1960, the Alabama legislature gave it its fourth and current name, Auburn University. By the way, Greensboro’s Southern University thrived there until the end of the nineteenth century, when it moved to Birmingham and served as the nucleus of Birmingham Southern College.
4 A Park with a View
Lee County contains a continent’s worth of variety. Most of the county lies within something called the Piedmont Plateau, an eighty-thousand-square-mile band of rolling hills and occasional rocky outcroppings stretching from New Jersey to Alabama.
Darden House.
The Piedmont, which includes the state’s highest peak, Cheaha Mountain, is a remnant of ancient eroded mountain chains. But Lee County is also where the Piedmont ends. The county’s southern edge marks the start of the low-lying, flat Atlantic Coastal Plain. The plain wraps the continent from New Jersey to the Gulf Coast. Chewacla State Park sits along the fall line between the two dramatically different geologies, which makes the park one of the best places to witness the drop in elevation as the Piedmont meets the coastal plain.
Besides a clear geological vista, the 696-acre park has a 26-acre lake with swimming and fishing, renovated cabins, primitive camping, picnicking, and trails, including a mountain bike trail and a tree identification trail.
5 Medicine and Manners
Before John Wesley Darden arrived in Opelika in 1903, members of the black community had to travel thirty miles or more for medical care or do without. Yvonne Brown Smith was one of the beneficiaries of that arrival. The physician attended her birth. As she grew up, she remembers Darden talking about his boyhood decision to practice medicine. “He said that his sister was gravely ill when he was growing up in Wilson, North Carolina, and they could not get a doctor, and they thought they were going to lose her. That was the beginning of the thought that he wanted to become a doctor.” The authors of Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine, Norma Jean and Carol Darden, say their uncle worked his way through college and medical school with summer jobs on the railroad and ships.
Lee County Society Museum.
When he was ready to practice medicine, his hometown finally had doctors for the black community, so he came to Opelika. The following year he built the home at 1323 Auburn Street, and in 1905 he married Maude Jean Logan. Born September 27, 1876, the hard-working physician made house calls, treated patients in his home, opened an office, and ran a drugstore on Avenue A with his brother, who had just graduated from Howard University with a degree in pharmacy. The Darden nieces wrote that the drugstore, which sold cosmetics and ice cream as well as medicine, became a focal point for the community. Unusual for the time, Darden and Homer Bruce, a white physician, frequently consulted each other.
Darden’s wife, Maude Jean, played a critical role in the education of young ladies in proper manners and behavior, Smith said. “Mrs. Darden took me up under her care. She would talk about how a young lady should act at all times. A lady should not be boisterous. A lady never crosses her legs. A lady would sit with dignity. Ladies would not fight. Then she would talk to us about table manners. She’d set up a table, and we’d sit there and eat, and if we were doing something wrong, she would correct us.” Among the prominent visitors to Darden and his wife were Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver.
The physician died in 1949, and his wife in 1976. They are buried in Rosemere Cemetery. In 1951 community leaders named J.W. Darden High School for him. In 1999 the Darden High Alumni Association acquired the Darden home. Later the J.W. Darden Foundation — Yvonne Smith, Ph.D., is its past director — completed renovation of the home in 2006.
6 A Town Trickles Away
The sleepy lanes of Loachapoka mislead the visitor. Here quiet seems an ingrained habit. But in fact this was the bustling community from which Lee County grew. Loachapoka was a busy trade center, an important rail connection, a place where cotton shipped out and goods shipped in, where stagecoaches stopped and people shopped. Today the Lee County Historical Society Museum maintains the memory of Loachapoka’s heyday. On the second Saturday of each month members of the historical society are on the ten-acre grounds demonstrating weaving, spinning, churning, and blacksmithing. In the heat of summer things get going early with some very strong coffee, and wrap up around 2 p.m. The newest additions to the museum are a re-creation of the office of Salem physician Andrew McLain, who practiced from 1900 to the mid-twentieth century, and a renovated cotton gin office. The old jail, which Loachapoka folks called the calaboose, will be the next addition. “They found it and it had been all grown over,” said Deborah McCord, who conducts children’s programs for the historical society, and is a longtime Loachapoka resident. “When they attempted to move it, it just fell apart on them.” It’s being rebuilt. Also on the grounds are a performance area and cookhouse, both of which get heaviest use during the Lee County Historical Fair and Syrup Soppin’ Days, which will take place October 25 this year.
Although the extension of the rail beyond Loachapoka eroded the town’s importance, and Reconstruction, along with the financial panic of 1873, caused further damage, life remained. “My daddy said he could remember when he was young — and he was born in 1916 — there were still seven general stores,” McCord said. Even as recently as the 1950s and early 1960s, there were three general stores in Loachapoka. But the growth of Auburn University spelled an end to Loachapoka vibrancy, as did the creation of independent school districts in Auburn and Opelika. That left the county district the poorest, and prompted some to move into the cities for the schools. Loachapoka was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
7 The Trail of Tears
When you stop in Loachapoka, remember that generations before the first white settlers arrived, Creek Indians inhabited this area of Alabama. The town’s name is believed to be a Creek word for “sleeping turtle” or “peaceful turtle.” An 1832 census recorded 564 Creeks in Loachapoka. Their disappearance from the region is one of the grimmest chapters in American history, the Trail of Tears. Nearly fifteen thousand Creeks, along with thousands of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Indians were forced to make a disastrous march across the continent in 1835-1837, leaving homes, farms, and possessions.
The march to the newly designated Indian lands in Oklahoma killed an estimated thirty-five hundred Creek — although death estimates for the Indian removal are extremely variable. Using a combination of bribes, threats, and manipulation of tribal leaders, the United States government forced the tribes to leave ancestral lands. Efforts to fight this action, including the Cherokee Nation’s successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, couldn’t stem the removal. Attempted rebellions met with military force, and President Andrew Jackson sealed the tribes’ fate with the signing of the Indian Removal Act, laying claim to all Indian Eastern lands. The government excused its action claiming national security concerns, despite the fact that many Eastern tribes had adopted white dress, manner, and education. In fact, Jackson and many other whites had financial stake in Indian lands. Although the United States provided a U.S. Army escort for the tribes, it failed to supply blankets and food for the Indians. Death came from exposure, disease, and starvation. The Creek held their last council fire in Loachapoka in 1832.
8 Pedal Power
There are a number of scenic bike routes around the county for the intrepid pedaler. Put on that helmet, be prepared to follow traffic laws, and get going. Oh, and just in case you think the traffic laws aren’t for you, here’s a true story. A friend of mine was bicycling to work and was hit by a car. He ended up in the hospital with a concussion — thank goodness his helmet took the brunt of the crash. It cracked like an egg.
Bicycles crossing.
If that wasn’t enough, witnesses say he failed to stop for a stop sign. Police in that town gave him a traffic ticket. Oh, and then his automobile insurance went up.
For the kids, the city of Auburn recommends a loop around the lakes at Technology Parks. It’s traffic-free and often includes frog serenades. There are picnic pavilions nearby. You can find maps of many Auburn bicycle tours on line at: www.auburnalabama.org/
cycle/PDFs/ToursBook2.pdf. Or you can pick up a copy of the Auburn Bicycle Tours Guide at the Parks and Recreation Department, 307 South Dean Road.
If you’re looking for a more ambitious bike tour, here’s one recommended by the Alabama Tourism Department. Take plenty of water and something to eat.
The Auburn-Loachapoka Loop
This 34-mile jaunt starts at the Auburn Public Library.
9 Bass Notes: Too Few on the Shoal
Even back in the 1940s and ’50s people knew there was something different about the red-eye bass in the Chattahoochee watershed. It wasn’t until 1999 that biologists realized just how different.
Courtesy of Auburn University Fisheries.
In fact the fish proved to be an entirely different, previously unidentified species, dubbed shoal bass. But the fish identification came almost too late. Today, shoal bass are almost gone in Alabama. They need moving water, so the damming of the Chattahoochee meant large-scale disappearance. By 2004 the fish was so scarce Alabama named it a species of special concern. Anglers must release any shoal bass they catch. What remains of the Alabama population live in a handful of Chattahoochee tributaries, including Halawakee, Halawaka, Little Uchee, and Wacoochee creeks in Lee County, said Mike Maceina, a fisheries biologist at Auburn University. The scientific name for the fish, Micropterus cataractae, means “little waterfall,” denoting the fish’s preference for deep shoals near cascading water. The loss of cascades means diminished populations, Maceina said. “A guy from Auburn [University] caught sixty-eight fish on the Halawakee twenty, thirty years ago. We caught only three in 2005,” he said. Diminished stream flow could be part of the problem. It’s more than drought. Rapid development in east Alabama means more wells and more ponds reducing the amount of water feeding creeks.
In a radio-tagging study researchers learned shoal bass are homebodies, seldom moving more than 200 yards. The most ambitious traveler among the twenty-four fish they tagged moved less than a half-mile, said Maceina, who with David Stormer conducted the studies. Oh, except for one fish that suddenly took off into the woods during the study. No, it hadn’t evolved legs. The ten-inch bass and its radio transponder were inside a water moccasin. Shoal bass can reach twenty-five inches and weigh more than eight pounds.
10 The Bridge Puzzle
Lee County’s last covered bridge was little more than a pile of lumber discarded behind Lowe’s after a tree fell on it in 2005. The Salem Shotwell Covered Bridge, built over the Wacoochee Creek in 1900 linking Salem and Shotwell, was originally seventy-six-feet long and built of hand-hewn timber.
Salem Shotwell covered bridge.
But it broke in two places, creating a construction jigsaw puzzle for John Marsh of J. Marsh Enterprises. Marsh’s company took on the project of rebuilding the bridge at the Opelika Municipal Park. The reconstructed bridge, now a modest forty-three feet, includes the original trusses, but it took heart pine from a demolished home in Salem to complete the work. White oak trees felled during Hurricane Katrina provided wood for the two-foot-long oak pegs holding the bridge together. Dudley Lumber Company in Salem donated wood for the roof and floor, and Scott Bridge Company of Opelika helped work out the details of how to recreate the turn-of-the-century engineering feat. Castone Corporation of Opelika made the concrete piers and Thompson Carriers’ eighteen-wheelers hauled the trusses. Also due some thanks? The graffiti artists who marked up the neglected bridge before it met its end: “The graffiti helped so much,” Marsh says. “It showed us how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.” The Salem Shotwell bridge is one of twelve covered bridges remaining in the state.
11 Take a Walk on the Wildlife Side
The Louise Kreher Forest Ecology Preserve, 3100 State Highway 147, belongs on your must-do list. You can wander these 110 acres on four miles of mostly wheelchair-accessible trails through the seven distinct ecosystems the preserve offers.
Bring along binoculars to scop
e out the butterflies in the butterfly garden.
Come early and borrow one of the thirty sets of binoculars and field guides. (It’s a free service. Just leave your driver’s license.) This year, every bluebird house holds a family. Binoculars are also a good way to scope out the butterflies in the butterfly garden or any dragonflies visiting the pond. Preserve administrator Jennifer Lolley says there is a decent chance of seeing deer, raccoon, and maybe even bobcat. If you hanker after songbird sightings, definitely head for the property under the power lines, which provides the kind of underbrush songbirds favor. The preserve is also one of the few places you can see an Alabama endangered ecosystem, the longleaf pine forest. Alabama is the fourth-most ecologically diverse state in the nation. Lolley says a visit to the preserve is a good way to see that diversity.
12 ‘Simply a Sort of a Miracle’
In 1896, for the price of a sport utility vehicle today ($24,000), Lee County built its second courthouse, the neoclassical revival building on Ninth Street in Opelika. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. But one of the most interesting things about the courthouse is what it replaced: a two-story Greek revival courthouse designed and built in 1867 by Horace King, a black man who, as a slave, became an engineer, construction contractor, and architect, and eventually won his freedom and continued to work across the southeast. King built the first bridge to cross the Chattahoochee — a five hundred and sixty-foot span from Columbus to Phenix City (then called Girard) — and many major crossings after that. He also built mills, warehouses, homes, and even some of the Alabama Capitol. Historians credit him with collaborating on the design and construction of the sweeping spiral staircase in the Capitol, noting the similarity in the engineering methods used to create the stairs and those King used in bridge construction.
Horace King. Courtesy of the Museum of East Alabama.
In addition to the original Lee County courthouse, King is also responsible for Spring Villa, the 1850-plantation home listed in the National Register of Historic Places, says Tom C. Lenard, an Auburn filmmaker who created a documentary about King. Most people know Spring Villa, six miles outside of Opelika, for a ghost story involving the murder of its owner, rather than for the unusual man involved in its creation. In fact, King’s role in its construction is not widely known. Even the National Register lists William Penn-Yonge, the home’s owner, as its builder and architect.
King earned his freedom in what today seems like a series of arcane steps, and while it is likely his own money paid for his freedom, the story is not so simple. Lenard’s documentary explains the process: King’s owner, John Godwin, about nine years King’s senior, seemed to treat King more like a business associate than a slave. King traveled to job sites and supervised them independently, even while still a slave. Sometime around 1841 Godwin may have given King his freedom, taking him to Ohio to secure his emancipation under that state’s law. There was a reason for this move: Law in Alabama and Georgia demanded that all freed slaves leave the state within thirty days or be subject to capture and further slavery. Then, in 1846, in an unusual move, the Alabama Legislature granted King his freedom, including a provision that allowed him to remain in Alabama without risk of re-enslavement. In government documents, King wrote that he paid for his freedom with $1,000 of his own money.
Historian William H. Green calls King “a miraculous exception” to the fate of most slaves. King is “simply a sort of miracle.” If you want to see Lenard’s documentary on King’s life, go to YouTube.com, and type the phrase “filmmakertom” in the search box. The 56-minute documentary is divided into six separate clips. Watching it is time well spent.
13 Little Ghost on the Prairie
If you’re going to be haunted, make sure it’s by an agreeable ghost, perhaps one who likes candy and is so fond of you he follows you like a puppy, plays mindless gentle pranks, and performs occasional good deeds. For Sydney Grimlett — the reputed ghost — it’s an incongruous end. Here’s the story, if you didn’t read it in fourth grade.
Sydney used to haunt Auburn University Chapel theater productions. When the theater group moved in 1971, the ghost, sensing his marketing and public relations responsibilities, moved with them to the Telfair Peet Theater. There he does things like turn lights on and off. If something goes wrong with a production, Sydney shoulders the blame. He likes M&Ms, apparently, and can be appeased with those. In life, Sydney was never so tame, nor — it must be said — so ineffectual. In fact he was (so the story goes) a swashbuckling Brit who crossed the pond to fight alongside the Sixth Virginia Cavalry. Sadly, the brave Captain Grimlett bled to death in the chapel — reputedly a makeshift hospital during the Civil War — during surgery to remove a gangrenous leg. Once dead, the daring-doer became a likeable bub, mooning about with theater folk.
While Sydney fights no more, he can still provoke a battle. In a discussion of Sydney’s legend on the website realhaunts.com, a free-for-all broke out between Auburn and University of Alabama partisans. It started when an Alabama defender claimed that Bama has had a ghost forever, and Auburn’s ghost was just an attempt to swipe Alabama’s ghostly glory. Auburn fans responded with taunts of win-loss records. Both sides declared the other one sucked. Finally, a faithful Auburn student, attempting to win the argument for her team, declared: “I go to Auburn and I have actually heard this story along with plenty of others … we even have a bell tower that is haunted by a cow.” Poor Sydney. First he loses his leg. Then his body. Then his dignity. And now he’s upstaged by a cow.
14 Farmers Markets
Still hankering after fresh produce? Lee County’s farmers markets can fill that yearning.
The Main Street Farmers Market on South Railroad Avenue, between Eighth and Ninth streets in Opelika, runs Tuesdays from 3 to 6 p.m. through August. The Market at Ag Heritage Park on the Auburn University campus takes place Thursdays from 3 to 6 p.m., June through September.
15 Still Got the Music
Folks who grew up in Loachapoka say music was always an important part of life there. Every third Thursday it still is.
Meadows Mill.
That’s when musicians gather at the Loachapoka United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall from 6 to 9 p.m. for the monthly jam session. Musicians have been meeting at the church hall to play for eleven years. These days players favor gospel, says Peck Rowell, who was among the gathering’s founders.
16 Resurrecting a Mirage, on Television No Less
Meadows Mill once ground grain with water power. When its restoration is complete it will be a home that not only harnesses hydropower, but solar power too —“an example of sustainable living,” says John Marsh of J. Marsh Enterprises in Opelika. The mill was built in 1830, as is evident from the construction. “It’s all hand-hewn timber, all mortise and tenon. There are no nails in it,” Marsh said. “It’s a pretty unique environment.” The finished home will include a touch of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in western Pennsylvania; the millstream will create a ten-foot-tall waterfall under the home, accessible through a lower-level door. The restoration project is the basis of the pilot episode of a television show Marsh and the man he calls his mentor — Atlanta businessman Don Martin — are shopping to HGTV, A&E, and TLC. Called Im-possible Restoration, Marsh likes to portray the show as “a mixture of Seinfeld, West Coast Choppers, This Old House, and The Apprentice.” And if you can’t quite picture what a show like that might look like — well, let’s just say it adds to the intrigue. Anyway, Marsh put together a team of television and film professionals to create a show that will teach people how to create and finance restoration projects. “To make historic renovation work in a small town, you have to make the money work. If the money doesn’t work, nothing else will work,” Marsh said.
“We’re going to take the guesswork out of how people put together deals, what you tell the bank. We’re looking at teaching financial literacy to the masses. I have something to share, and it’s money works like gravity: It’s the same every time.”
17 Lee County Mirage: The Defunct Covered Bridges
If you’re really interested in ghosts, head over to Halawakee Creek near Beulah and see if you can summon up the ghost of one of Lee County’s two defunct covered bridges. The bridge at Meadows Mill, near the historic gristmill, burned down in 1973. It was one-hundred-and-forty-feet long. The county’s other vanished covered bridge was in Auburn, across the Sougahatchee Creek. It collapsed in April of 1959.
18 Big Fish in a Big Pond
Last year someone caught a forty-five pound catfish at Lee County State Public Fishing Lake southwest of Opelika. On Mother’s Day weekend this year, a mother and daughter hauled seventy-two pounds of catfish — that’s twelve fish — out of the lake, says Dwight Lake, who runs the state facility with his wife, Teresa.
Last year someone caught a forty-five pound catfish at Lee County State Public Fishing Lake southwest of Opelika.
Besides catfish, there are bass, crappie, shellcracker, and bluegill. The state dug the one-hundred-and-thirty-acre lake in 1968 and it opened in 1970. While some fifteen thousand anglers visit every year, Lake says it’s surprising how many people don’t know about it. For three dollars a day, kids over twelve and adults can wet a line. Children under twelve are free. The facility also rents bait, tackle, and motor boats. There are cabins for rent as well. To find the lake, head southwest on Lee Road 146. More information:749-1275
19 War Relics
A man who no longer lives in Lee County was the force behind the creation of the Museum of East Alabama, said Glenn Buxton, the museum’s executive director. John T. Harris, who lives in McCook, Nebraska, with his wife, Eleanor, was a farmer in Lee County before moving to the Midwest.
Museum of East Alabama.
He started a museum in McCook, Buxton said, and decided to do the same for his hometown. He did so in 1989, and today the museum at 121 South Ninth Street in Opelika includes some sixteen hundred square feet of exhibit space. Exhibits cover history both distant — a fifty-five-hundred-year-old canoe — and near — the many items documenting the importance of the rail lines to Opelika’s development. It also holds one of the only two existing magnetic tape machines captured from the Germans by Opelika native John Herbert Orr, an Army intelligence officer investigating this technology during World War II. (The Smithsonian holds the other machine.) Germany developed magnetic tape technology in the 1930s, according to an article in the Harvard Business History Review. Using his war-earned knowledge, Orr went on to found the magnetic-tape manufacturer Orrado, which was later purchased by its competitor, Ampex. Orr also founded the now-defunct Opelika radio station, WJHO. His initials were the call letters.
20 The Men with the Desert Fox
It’s not clear why Opelika was chosen as the site of a prisoner of war camp from 1942 to 1945, but the eight hundred acres between Society Hill Road and Highway 51 became Alabama’s second World War II prison camp, opening not long after another, larger camp at Aliceville in West Alabama.
Photos courtesy of the Museum of East Alabama.
Newspaper accounts at the time seem at pains to show happy prisoners. A camp official told reporters that the men sang folk songs before and after meals and while they worked, and that many were devout Catholics.
In fact, one account of life at Camp Opelika by former prisoner Alfred Klein sounds positively invigorating. Allen Cronenberg quotes him in his book, Forth to the Mighty Conflict: Alabama and World War II.
“Sport started right after breakfast,” Klein said, “and our camp had a whole slate of outstanding teams in soccer, handball, volleyball, etc. Athletic activities were taken very, very seriously. The camp championships, especially in soccer and handball, were so exciting that even our guards participated as cheerleaders from their towers and attended the games on weekends with their families shouting from the sidelines. Many of our athletes, as a matter of fact, went on to sports careers in Germany after their release.”
Prisoners also produced a newspaper, Der Querschnitt (The Cross Section), attended courses taught by Alabama Polytechnic instructors, created a thirty-two piece symphony orchestra, fielded baseball teams, and staged theatrical performances.
Most of the Camp Opelika prisoners were captured by the British while serving with Erwin Rommel (dubbed “The Desert Fox”) in North Africa. By 1945 there were 371,000 German POWs in the United States and another 55,000 prisoners from other Axis powers. The Museum of East Alabama’s display of Camp Opelika artifacts is one of the most popular with visitors.
Have your own nominations? Let us know at editor@lee-magazine.com.
