Sketches of Alabama

"Sketches of Alabama" was the name of a 59-part series of historical articles contributed by Mary Gordon Duffee to the Birmingham Weekly Iron Age between 1886 and 1887.

Duffee recalled in the "Sketches" her family's yearly peregrinations from Tuscaloosa to Blount Springs, where her father, Matthew Duffee, ran a resort hotel. Though a teenager at the time, she was an inquisitive traveller and learned much about the families, folklore, geography and natural history of Jones Valley and nearby settlements. She used the articles as a platform from which to elaborate on anecdotes, historical themes, biographies, predictions and flights of lyrical imagination. Despite her florid language and frequent diversions from the central theme, the historical content of her writings stands up to reference with other published sources, many of which she employed in composing her essays. The "Sketches" have since become invaluable as source material for other historians such as Ethel Armes.

The articles were submitted at the invitation of editor Charles Hayes, a friend of Duffee's, in hopes of sparking interest in the paper's moribund readership. Her compensation was 20 subscriptions, which she distributed to friends and correspondents. The series ended when Hayes sold the paper to the founders of the Age-Herald Company.

In 1908 she corresponded with Thomas M. Owen, founder of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. It was Owens intention to see the "Sketches" compiled and published in book form. The difficulty of assembling all of the manuscripts prevented the project from completion at that time, before the Department had access to the full run of the Weekly Iron Age.

In 1937, seven years after Duffee's death, the W. P. A. Writer's Project created two typescript copies of the "Sketches" with subject indices, from the then-completed newspaper files. One copy was deposited in the State Archives and the second in the Southern Collection of the Birmingham Public Library.

In the 1950s Virginia Pounds Brown and Jane Porter Nabers began editing the "Sketches" for contemporary readers, removing much of the poetry and eulogy and other diversions and collecting the scattered stories into a more ordered narrative. The results were published in The Alabama Review in several parts, spanning from 1953 to 1957. These edited chapters and notes, together with an introductory essay and illustrations taken from contemporary newspapers, were published in book form by the University of Alabama Press in 1970.

References

• Brown, Virginia Pounds and Jane Porter Nabers (1970) "Editors Note" in Brown, Virginia Pounds and Jane Porter Nabers, eds. (1970) Mary Gordon Duffee's Sketches of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press ISBN 081735011X

External links

• Mary Gordon Duffee's Sketches of Alabama (1970) at Google Books