Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 22, 1992 TAG: 9203220254
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: George & Rosalie Leposky
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In towns like Westville, Ga., these pioneers bought food from local merchants, filled saddlebags or wagons, and headed west toward the Mississippi River. Ahead of them lay dense forests, deep swamps, and unfriendly Creek Indians along the primitive trails and paths of the Federal Road across land that would become Alabama and Mississippi.
Westville is a living-history village, created in the 20th century with buildings relocated from nearby communities. Still, it represents what travelers along the Federal Road would have experienced 175 years ago. The historic buildings along its packed mud streets lack electricity and running water. Staff members in costume serve visitors food cooked in cast iron pots over an open-hearth fire, just as it was in the early 1800s.
Five buildings in Westville date from the era of the Federal Road: the two-story Wells House, built of split logs by an Indian family in the mid-1820s near Buena Vista; the 1835 gable-roofed Lawson House from Stewart County; and three from Lumpkin - the 1836 weatherboard Singer tailor/cabinet shop, the 1830s German-style Johann George Singer Home and the two-story 1832 Stewart Academy Building.
The Federal Road ran through the Creek Indian Nation from Milledgeville, Ga., on the Oconee River to New Orleans, with side roads branching off to other communities. It also has become known as the Old Federal Road to differentiate it from other, more recent federal highways.
"The 1,152-mile-road Federal Road system between Washington and New Orleans was 320 miles less than the road system that included the Natchez Trace - a 10-day gain in traveling time," says Henry DeLeon Southerland, co-author of "The Federal Road," a book sponsored by the Historic Chattahoochee Commission and published in 1989 by the University of Alabama Press.
Jerry Elijah Brown, the book's other co-author and an Auburn University journalism professor, notes that the Federal Road almost has been forgotten while the Natchez Trace and wagon routes farther west remain well-known to modern travelers. "There are remains of over 40 battle sites, communities and forts along the Federal Road," he says. "Historic signs need to be erected along it to show what the road was and where our forebears traveled."
Construction of the Federal Road and its branches began almost as soon as Congress ratified the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1806 it was complete, a trail four feet wide, barely enough to accommodate a single horseback rider carrying the mail. Like the Natchez Trace, it followed ridges and watersheds so rainwater would drain off both sides.
The Federal Road served four major purposes. It opened up the area to settlement, improved communication between Washington and New Orleans, controlled the Creek Indians and held in check the Spanish who occupied Mobile until 1813.
Five years later it was widened into a military highway for use against the Indians, but instead it attracted thousands of settlers' wagons. Brown and Southerland report that a winter flood which swept away the Calabee Creek bridge in 1832 interrupted the travel of an estimated 10,000 people.
After the Creeks were forcibly relocated to the west in 1836, communities along the Federal Road withered as alternate routes evolved. What remains along its route today are isolated rural churches, graveyards, overgrown pathways and crumbling bridges across rivers and streams.
The best place to find remnants of the Federal Road is along U.S. Highway 80 between Columbus, Ga., and Montgomery, Ala., a desolate region of timberland with few houses or gas stations. "When you leave Phoenix City," says Thomas French, a Columbus, Ga., landscape architect and surveyor who is remapping the road, "the Federal Road is on the left about 100 feet or so. For a couple of miles its bed is under U.S. 80. Occasionally, it dips off to the right and you can see the deep cuts of the old road. At Uchee Creek, there once was an inn and one of the oldest white settlements in the Chattahoochee Valley."
The Historic Chattahoochee Commission, encompassing 18 counties in Alabama and Georgia, hopes to publish a book combining French's maps with photographs by Mark Dauber, who lives near the Federal Road in the Montgomery County, Ala., community of Hope Hull. Southerland and Brown's book inspired Dauber to spend three years photographing the road, using an 1834 survey that purports to locate its exact path and the taverns along its route.
"The Federal Road goes through some extraordinary parts of rural Alabama, including Creek Stand, Manack's Stand, and Warrior Stand," Dauber says.
These places take their names from inns along the Federal Road, which were often called stands, Brown explains. "They were frequently located near forts and about 16 miles apart the average day's travel for foot traffic."
One Federal Road building that has been preserved is the Walter B. Lucas Tavern, relocated to serve as the reception center at Old Alabama Town, a three-block area of Montgomery with 30 historic structures. The Lucas Tavern was built about 1818 near Mount Meigs, where the Federal Road veers to the southwest 10 miles east of Montgomery. The Marquis de Lafayette stayed there during an 1825 visit to the Mississippi Territory.
Five miles southwest of Montgomery, off Interstate 65 at the Pintala-Tyson exit, a historical marker identifies the site of Manack Stand at the intersection of U.S. 31 and Cloverfield Road. Aaron Burr, best remembered for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, is reputed to have stayed at Manack Stand in 1807. He was being returned from Mississippi to Virginia to stand trial for treason, for allegedly plotting to set up an independent empire in the southwest.
For more information on the Federal Road and the communities along its route, contact:
Historic Chattahoochee Commission, 211 N. Eufaula Ave., PO Box 33, Eufaula AL 36072, telephone 205-687-9755 or fax 205-687-6631.
Old Alabama Town, 310 N. Hull St., Montgomery AL 36104, telephone 205- 263-4355. Summer tour hours Monday to Saturday 9 a.m.-3:30 p.m., Sunday 1:30-3:30 p.m.
Westville, P.O. Box 1850, Lumpkin GA 31815, telephone 912-838-6310. Open Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday 1-5 p.m.
For general Alabama tourist information contact the Bureau of Tourism and Travel, State of Alabama, 401 Adams Ave., PO Box 4309, Montgomery AL 36103-43094, telephone 1-800-Alabama, 205-242-4515, fax 205-242-4554.
Ampersand Communications
George and Rosalie Leposky are a husband-wife team of widely published travel writers who live in Miami. He teaches college writing classes; she has taught cooking.
by CNB