Photo by Julie Royster, Raleigh, N. C.
Trotwood’s Travels
LITTLE JOURNEYS THROUGH THE SOUTH—FLORENCE ALABAMA.
It is fitting that the story of the journey to Florence, Ala., should appear In the same issue with Jackson’s march into the Creek Nation; for the story of this pretty little city on the Tennessee, between the foothills of the mountains and the cotton plains beyond, is literally thumb-marked with Old Hickory.
Andrew Jackson knew and understood what was good in woman, in man and in land. In these he never erred. Never in his life did he tie on to a quitter or touch a yellow streak. When he stamped the seal of his friendship on a man or woman, or drove the steel of his compass[1] on land he had decided to buy, they were already registered. And history, a century later, will tell you they were not false.
When a man’s judgment, like his literature, stands the test of a century, it is good for all time.
But before the white man was the Indian, and before the Indian, the Mound Builders. The Mound Builders never were known to settle on poor land. They found Florence before the Indian, before the white man, before the hero of New Orleans.
It is beautiful to speculate about those people. Who they were and what they were only their great, silent mound monuments tell, and they are as dumb as the unreturning past.