A Tale of Two Histories
The City of Fairhope began as a dream in the minds of a group of populist reformers who were seeking their own special utopia. After searching several Southern states for possible sites, they chose the Eastern shore of Mobile Bay and declared November 15, 1894, as "Round-Up Day." Our founders settled on the high bluff where they bought clear-cut wasteland for $5.50 per acre. They thought using the Single Tax plan would give them at least a "fair hope" of succeeding. Thus, the Fairhope Single Tax Colony was founded, attracting supporters and financial backers from around the country and drawing an eclectic assemblage of industrious, creative and free-thinking people to Fairhope, Alabama.
“City of Fairhope History” from the City of Fairhope’s website
Fairhope stands on the shoulders of giants, Lee Turner, president of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony (STC) said. The single-taxers sacrificed by giving the best land, doing for others, and helping the community because they believed in creating a better place to live. The biggest legacy of the Single Tax Corporation is the quality of life for the whole community, with much to do for free, he added.
“You don't have to own a $2 million bay house to fish or watch a sunset,” he said. “There are parks for picnics and listening to the symphony. STC bought the tickets for everyone. You just have to get out and enjoy it.”
“It is frustrating to see that some have forgotten Fairhope’s history and lost the idealism by becoming much more concerned about ‘what is in it for me’ and ‘not in my backyard’,” Turner said. “It is up to us to carry on the legacy and to keep actively making Fairhope a desirable place to live with opportunities for everyone.”
According to signs in the Fairhope Museum of History, Fairhope was founded by populists reacting to the industrial revolution of the 1870s. “. . . as industrialists got richer, the farmers got poorer.”
A docent at the Fairhope Museum of History told a tour group, “You could call them Socialists, but that was before Socialists was a bad word.” The 28 original settlers came from Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio. They wore red ribbons on their journey south to Alabama so they would recognize one another when they boarded the train in St. Louis on November 14, 1894.
This “fair hope of success” is the feel-good history of Fairhope, but the untold story is of the black people who go back for generations and who have never been anywhere else, according to the Rev. John Whitfield, founding pastor of New Zion Christian Church.
“The freed slaves came here for the same reasons as the single-taxers,” Whitfield said. “Equality, justice, a better life for their families, and affordable land. A big part of Fairhope’s story is the value of the dirt.”
Before Fairhope Avenue and the pier, this was an agrarian community with large tracts of land owned by freed black people, Whitfield said. It was originally Alabama City, a failed real estate development, according to the video “Celebrating African-American Heritage of Fairhope, Alabama.”
A historic marker installed in 2018 at Coastal Alabama Community College in Fairhope expands the Fairhope story to Nancy Lewis, a widowed freed slave who moved to southwest Baldwin County, an affordable area for freed slaves without the tradition of plantations. An informal agreement allowed the Lewis family to homestead on unused land by paying county taxes of $2 per year. They cleared 15 of the 40 claimed acres and built houses, orchards, and gardens. In 1894, the single tax newcomers paid Ms. Lewis $100 for land that would become part of downtown Fairhope. Ms. Lewis and her family were not included in the colony, but the colonists helped her find land outside it.
A museum sign explains that the colonists felt strongly about the injustices of racial bias. They were conflicted about remaining true to their convictions, which meant including the Lewis family in the new colony, but were “threatened by nearby ex-Confederate’s attitudes.” It also says that African-Americans were soon welcomed in Fairhope, and the Fairhope Industrial Association arranged for Lewis to buy a 40-acre tract for $4.58, located where Thomas Hospital is today. It became known as the Nancy Lewis Subdivision.
Nichols. Gaston. Greeno. Wasp. Young. Houston. Streets and roads in Fairhope are reminders of the black and white families that were here first. Some of their descendants live there today.
The Houston family is still in the area called Houstonville, wrote Bayside Academy student Isabella McCormick in her story, “A Brief History of Houstonville,” for the Fairhope Junior City Council Journal. She reported that Mike Houston was born in Stockton, Alabama in 1863, and moved to Magnolia Springs with his mother, a sharecropper, after Emancipation. Houston worked as a caretaker for a family in Point Clear that taught him business skills. He became a prominent businessman and land broker, and the area along Twin Beech Road where he owned the majority of the land became known as “Houstonville.”
Clarice Hall-Black, Houston’s great-great granddaughter, recently retired with her husband from the Air Force and returned home to raise their young sons in Houstonville.
“I married a Caucasian man and we moved to Fairhope to give our boys the childhood I had around our family on our land,” she said. “We have chickens and share eggs with cousins, aunts, and uncles. They give us their fruit and vegetables and a lot of love.”
She also sees Fairhope through the eyes of her parents and grandparents. “In the military, I lived all over the world, but Fairhope is the only place I feel uncomfortable for being black.”
Hall-Black is filling notebooks with stories that her family passes down. Stories from the beginning of Fairhope when “black people, mulattoes, and other nationalities owned land on the beachfront that was taken from them by those moving in,” she said.
“My grandmother talked about her mother and grandmother being strong in their community, but if a white man said he was going to buy your land at this price, you accepted it and moved. These were sharecroppers coming from slavery who had been trained to accept the authority of white men. My grandmother and great-grandmother didn't like to talk about those times and would say, ‘We are past that’.
“The black community knew they weren’t wanted in Fairhope except to work, and learned to keep to themselves,” she said. “My family said they knew to get out of Fairhope before sundown.”
Paul Gaston, a grandson of Fairhope founder E.B. Gaston, grew up in Fairhope but said in interviews that he left in frustration to fight racial inequality. He became a history professor at the University of Virginia in 1957, making a career of telling the truth about the South and advocating for Civil Rights. In hIs essay “Irony in Utopia, the Discovery of Nancy Lewis,” Paul Gaston wrote, “Local custom easily overrode abstract principles and Nancy Lewis was displaced.”
Gaston was committed to his grandfather’s ideals of social justice, even if they didn’t come true in Fairhope. He wrote that his grandfather made it clear that the ‘whites-only’ policy was a fundamental contradiction of the ‘good theory’ on which the Fairhope practical demonstration was based. The compromise was made believing that “racial prejudice was a function of economic injustice.” Fairhope’s founder hoped the new community could point the way to a better economic order because he believed “the only remedy to racism is economic freedom.”
Gaston also wrote that E.B. Gaston wanted to start up a single-tax colony in the black community adjacent to Fairhope, and was disgusted by the racism around him. In the 1920s Gaston’s newspaper, The Fairhope Courier, spoke out against lynchings in Alabama and the cross burnings, parades, and activities of the Ku Klux Klan in Fairhope.
The 1920s were a time of fear for some and enlightenment for others.
“By the 1920s Fairhope was a mature social experiment,” reads a sign in the museum. There were free thinkers, artists, visitors and “mavericks” putting their children in the Organic School. With no rich people and few who were poor; with no hierarchy, pretension or ostentatious homes, Fairhope seemed to demonstrate the virtues of Henry George’s economic theories.”
But not for everyone. Whitfield’s father pastored Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Point Clear for 35 years. They lived in Mobile and he said going with his father to Point Clear was “like going through a time warp.”
“The black children couldn’t attend the closest school but walked miles through red dirt to the school that accepted them,” Whitfield said. “The old Antioch church burned, but the bell that they rang for hurricanes and jubilees is still there.”
At that time, this dirt was poor farmland with no value except to grow potatoes and corn, Whitfield said. The ferry made Fairhope a desirable place for Mobilians who wanted summer homes on the bluff. The rules of real estate and highest and best use changed from growing potatoes to building homes, making the dirt more valuable.
“By sleight of hand, newcomers acquired land along the bluff and pushed the black families farther back,” he said.
Charles Durgin’s grandfather was a sharecropper in northern Alabama before he moved to Point Clear in 1947. He worked landscaping at the Grand Hotel and bought land on Ponder Road.
“We lived in Point Clear and all of the blacks worked in the servitude jobs at the hotel and Thomas Hospital,” Durgin said. “My father claimed he was eight years old when he started working at the Grand Hotel's horse arena.”
Point Clear was a tight community where families helped build wells and clear land with hand tools for neighbors building houses, Durgin said. Farmers let them scavenge in fields after the harvest. Neighbors shared food and cups of flour to make a meal.
Durgin’s grandfather eventually had three homes on Ponder Road and gave the first two to his family. “The land was dirt-cheap back then,” he said “His third home was a brick house and that was a big deal because of where he came from with very little education. That inspired me and we are still hanging on to the land and that house today.”
“My parents made nothing go far,” Durgin said. “They never dreamed their land would one day be surrounded by huge homes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The dirt was often passed down for generations, but sometimes not legally transferred, Whitfield said. “There was a time when Granny lined her kids up on the front porch and said, ‘from the chinaberry tree to the trail is yours, and from the trail to the pecan tree is yours’,” he said. “Surveys cost money families didn’t have, and some of the trees and trails are gone. If it is not legally recorded, everything is hearsay, leaving no ground to stand on. That makes it easier for today’s gentrification.”
History is repeating itself today, Hall-Black said. No longer the small and quaint town on the bay, Fairhope is growing fast, and the only land left to expand is in the black neighborhoods. “Once again the black families are getting pushed farther out,” she said.
Hall-Black said the Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA) is building a large development behind her family property. The owner prior to RSA acquired the property but didn't know her family lived on the hillside. It wasn't until RSA started the survey that they noticed structures on the land.
“My grandfather was informed of what portion he could have of this parcel of land his family lived on for over 100 years,” she said. “His children wanted to put up a fight, but being born in 1925, my grandfather's mindset was he didn’t want any trouble. So he accepted what was offered to him.”
Some of the land gets sold by younger generations that move away and are never coming back. They pay the taxes and just want to get rid of the land, Hall-Black said.
“They agree to the low price suggested by the Realtor because of the location,” she said. “But they have been gone so long they don’t know what is happening here. As the land sells and one white person buys in, the land is worth double. Some of my family sold their land like this.”
Developers aren't building affordable housing on this land or helping the people in the communities they buy into, Hall-Black said. “These should be homes for first-time buyers, but developers make as much money as they can. One day it will be just the rich people living here, too.”
“Where is left for us to go?” she asks. “As they clear-cut the trees, they destroy the history. They cover the creeks where black families got their water and washed their clothes. Developers say the dirt roads that have been here for generations aren’t roads, then put up fences to block roads from being used. Fences the neighborhood has to keep taking down.
“No matter how long you have lived in a place, you can be erased or ignored,” Hall-Black said. “Just because a road is unpaved doesn’t mean it is unimportant or unused in our community.”
Years ago, the city tore down the basketball court and park in the black community, she said. She suggested building a nice place for kids on “this side of town that everyone would want to use.
“We can start building relationships and trust,” she said. “We can use the land at the Anna T. Jeans school at Section and Twin Beech, the crossroads of the black and white communities, for outdoor movie nights and fish fries that bring us all together.”
There are things Fairhope can do better, Hall-Black said. Invite other races into the Mardi Gras krewes. Show black and brown faces in the magazines, in crowd pictures from events, or even on the dentist’s website. Mentor minority students at local businesses or let them know about opportunities in arts organizations.
“Someone has to take the first step because our kids are growing up in Fairhope and not seeing images of people who look like them,” she said. “Imagery matters and I want to help make Fairhope a place where all kids feel wanted.
“Fairhope has grown and changed, but the invisible and silent lines keeping us out of the city are still there,” Durgin said. “There are no black officials in city government. There is no black voice or a black leader. We are still a ways behind and it is hard to catch up.”
Durgin said the first step is finding common ground and getting the right people talking. “What if one Sunday, the preacher in every church, black and white, preached the same sermon?” he asked. “What if they just preached on love? Sunday is the most segregated day of the week, but it could become a community event that brings us together.”
Fairhope Mayor Karin Wilson said she agreed that it is time to come together. She is pushing for a basketball court and bringing back the community park at the Rotary Youth Club on Young Street. Fairhope is in the 21st century and there are people who don’t want Fairhope to be separated any longer, Wilson said.
“We must be more inclusive, where everyone is given opportunities,” she said “I also want the black community to have representation, but that starts with annexation.
“For a long time there has been fear, miscommunication, and misinformation about annexation,” she said. “The city lines don’t make sense and there are doughnut holes all over the map, where some communities are outside the city limits but the people surrounding them are inside.
“This community deserves more and I want to help them, but we can't proactively plan and act while they are outside the city limits,” she said. “Some don’t want to come into the city because they are afraid it will cost more in taxes and that regulations could change the way they have lived for generations on their land.
“Annexation into the city gives them a vote and representation, but this is their decision and they have to take an active role,” she said.
Hall-Black is taking an active role, but says that with or without annexation, there aren’t enough black voices to count.
“We simply don’t matter to many people in Fairhope,” she said. “The only thing that matters is our land.”
Fairhope was founded by idealists who took an active role to create a better community. Signs at the Fairhope Museum of History explain that the Fairhope Single Tax Philosophy was known as a utopian plan for society, and defines utopia as, “a world free of poverty and corruption, where all religious views except atheism were tolerated and education was compulsory for men and women.”
The first step toward utopia was the colony’s purchase of 135 acres with a half-mile of frontage on the bay in January 1895. Holdings increased to 4,000 acres by 1907, mostly farmland that extended four miles from the bay. The land was free for the asking, requiring an annual rent payment based on the value of the land. They reserved the most beautiful bluffs and beach property for parks.
They named streets after their ideals, including Equity, Liberty, and Justice.
Think of the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation as a nonprofit real estate mutual fund, explained George Gilmore, a Fairhope Single Tax Colony board member and Trustee. The rising value of the mutual fund is taxed, and that tax goes back into the community, not to developers or speculators. The Single Tax Colony holds the title to 4,500 acres in Fairhope, worth approximately $300 million. Some of the first STC projects were wide streets and a town set back from the bluff that still shapes Fairhope today, he added.
Gilmore teaches a class each fall on the history and purpose of the Single Tax Colony, telling of Fairhope’s “inauspicious beginning when the single-taxers arrived here on a wing and a prayer. They were poor when they arrived because they put up everything they owned to be here.”
The biggest impact of the STC was the people it brought to the coast of Alabama, Turner said. “People from across the country and all parts of the world brought different types of thoughts, including fairness and a level playing field. Cooperative individualism encouraged free thinking. Fairhope had nudist beaches in the 1930s and supported the women’s suffrage movement.”
Whitfield said that free-thinking is needed to improve the quality of life in Fairhope.The community must include the segments that have been treated as “non-existent or less than important.”
“The future of Fairhope depends on economic opportunity for all citizens,” he said. “We can no longer leave behind those hidden on the other side of the line.”
A community is like a quilt, and quilt-making is intentional, Whitfield said. The makers envision the finished work, then set about stitching together the miscellaneous pieces of discarded cloth.
“Quiltmakers step back to see if they are still being true to their vision,” he said. “If there are pieces missing, or if there are holes in it, then you can't call it a quilt. It doesn't function in its original intent of providing protection and bringing comfort.”
Whitfield said we must step back from this quilt called Fairhope and see if the vision of equality is emerging or are we merely stitching pieces together without intent or purpose.
“It is time to talk about our past, mend our present, and complete our quilt.”
This is the fourth story in the five-part series. Next week is “Providing Help, Even in Utopia.”
