The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

Bessie had been born and raised in Darling and couldn’t imagine a different life for herself, although she sometimes envied people like Charlie Dickens, who had been to New York and Paris and Cleveland and Baltimore and who knows where else. But if you had lived in a big city for a while, you would surely have seen how dirty and ugly and unfeeling it was, with nobody but strangers wherever you looked. When you got to Darling, you’d notice the difference. You’d be grateful.

And there was plenty to be grateful for, in Bessie’s opinion. For one thing, the town looked pretty much as it always had, and if you weren’t aware of the current sorry state of national affairs, you couldn’t tell it by looking around Darling. It was a lovely place, with huge magnolia trees along the streets and flowers in the yards and friendly people and a fascinating history. Mobile was seventy miles to the south, a half-day drive, more if the roads were bad and you had to get a farmer and his horse to pull you out of a mud hole. Montgomery, the state capital, was a hundred miles north, too far to drive unless you absolutely had to and were a glutton for punishment. If you didn’t want to drive, of course, you could take the train both ways. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad went north and south out of Monroeville, twenty miles to the east, and there was a local spur that went to Monroeville. Get on the train in Darling first thing in the morning, get off in Mobile before lunch or in Montgomery by early afternoon.

The site for the town was picked out in 1823 by Joseph P. Darling. He had come all the way from Virginia in a wagon pulled by a team of oxen, with his wife, five children, two slaves, a pair of milk cows, and a horse. He intended to keep on going as far as the great Mississippi River, where he planned to start a cotton plantation and make a lot of money, now that Mr. Jefferson had bought and paid for the Louisiana Purchase.

But Mrs. Darling had other ideas, as the story had been told to Bessie by one of their descendants. The Darling party camped for the night beside Pine Mill Creek. When Mrs. Darling got up the next morning, the rain had put the campfire out, the wood was soaked, and breakfast was cold corn pone and last night’s cold coffee. For Mrs. Darling, who was tired to death of traveling, that was the last straw.

“Mr. Darling, I am not ridin’ another mile in that blessed wagon,” she said. “If you want your meals an’ your washin’ done reg’lar, this is where you’ll find it—soon as you put a roof over my head. Until then, I ain’t gettin’ back in that wagon for love nor money. You kin put that in your pipe an’ smoke it.”

Confronted with this ultimatum (and without his coffee), Mr. Darling took a long look around. He noticed the rich soil, the Alabama River flowing quietly not far away, the fast-moving creek where they were camped, and the fish in the creek and the wild game in the woods. He took into account the abundant timber—loblolly and longleaf pines on the gently rolling hills, with tulip trees and sweet gum in the bottoms, as well as pecan and sycamore and magnolia and sassafras. He also took into account the fact that he liked clean britches and his three squares a day. Altogether, he felt compelled to reply, “Well, if you insist, Mrs. Darling. You can take your bonnet off and get out your washboard. We’re stayin’.”

And stay they did. Mr. Darling cut enough loblollies to build a cabin for the family, another for the slaves, and a barn for the animals. More Darlings trickled out from Virginia, and before long, the Darling clan had built a general store, a sawmill, a gristmill, a school, and a church. More folks came, of different religious persuasions, so they needed more churches. And the more people came, the more money they brought with them and earned when they got there, so they definitely needed more stores where they could spend it. It wasn’t long before Darling became a county seat and got dirt sidewalks and a brick courthouse with a bell tower and a county government and a county sheriff. It was on its way to being a real town.

Darling wasn’t an isolated, out-of-the-way town, either, the way some little towns were, stuck way out in the elbow-bend back of nowhere. Steamboats chugged up and down the Alabama River, picking up cotton and delivering supplies at plantation landings, which made it easy to go south to Mobile or north to Montgomery, if somebody wanted to. And not long after the War, the owners of the sawmill, the hotel, and the bank scraped the money together to build a railroad spur that connected Darling to the Louisville & Nashville Railroad just outside Monroeville, which meant that everybody could go pretty much anywhere they wanted, even when the roads were bad (which they were, most of the time) or the river was flooded (which it was, every spring).