The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

Darlingians generally agreed. Of course, there were the usual complainers, who didn’t like this or that or the other thing. But for the most part, people thought their little town was a fine place to live. It was located in the gently rolling hills seventy miles north of Mobile—a full half-day drive away, more, if the roads were muddy—and a hundred miles south of the state’s capital, Montgomery. As Bessie Bloodworth related the story in her lectures on local history, the town had been established in the early 1800s by Joseph P. Darling, a Virginian who had come into the area with his wife, five children, two slaves, a team of oxen, two milk cows, and a horse. Surveying the rich timber and fertile soils, the nearby river and the fast-flowing creek, Mr. Darling thought that the little valley would be a good place to live—and besides, his wife was sick and tired of life on the road and insisted that they settle down. According to Bessie, she said, with extraordinary firmness, “I am not ridin’ another mile in that blessed wagon, Mr. Darling. If you want your meals and your washin’ done steady, this right here is where you’ll find it.”


So Mr. Darling (who liked to eat every day and wear a clean shirt on Sundays) built two log cabins (a big one for his family, a smaller one for his slaves) and a barn, and then (because he was of an entrepreneurial turn) a general store. The gently rolling hills were covered with loblolly and long-leaf pines, with sweet gum and tulip trees in the creek and river bottoms, and magnolia and sassafras and sycamore and pecan. Mr. Darling’s cousin, who had followed him from Virginia, built a sawmill, so that all those fine trees could be turned into boards for building. A gristmill followed almost immediately, which meant that anybody who could put in an acre or two of corn could get it ground and make corn pone. A couple of churches came next, and a schoolhouse, and not long after, several cotton gins and a cottonseed oil mill, which processed the cotton grown on plantations around the town and along the Alabama River, a few miles to the west. The roads were indescribably bad when it rained (which was often), so the Alabama River carried most of the north-south traffic, with steamboats shuttling back and forth between Montgomery and Mobile, delivering people and supplies at plantation landings and picking up baled cotton and other products.

Darling’s history didn’t include very much in the way of historic events, except when some Union soldiers tore through the town at the end of the War (always spoken of in Darling with a capital W). Or when the railroad spur was finally finished, connecting Darling to the Louisville & Nashville Railroad just outside Monroeville and delivering a final blow to river travel, since trains and railroad tracks were more reliable and cheaper to operate than the old-fashioned paddle wheelers, which had a nasty habit of sinking when the steam engine blew up or the boat rammed a snag. Oh, and there was the 1907 tornado, which had done more damage than the damn Yankees, tearing the bell tower off the recently built courthouse and ripping the roofs off houses and killing a dozen people.

But after that, things quieted down. The bell tower was rebuilt, the town grew a little bigger, and when the Great War came, the price of cotton went through the roof. Still, nothing much of note had happened since the boys of the 167th came home from France in 1919—or didn’t, as in the case of Lizzy’s fiancé, Reggie Morris. The Roaring Twenties had roared through Darling very quietly, since the local ladies weren’t crazy about bobbed hair and skirts so short they couldn’t sit down in them, and most of the people in town belonged to a church that turned thumbs-down on dancing. There wasn’t supposed to be any drinking of alcoholic beverages after the Alabama legislature passed the Bone-Dry Act of 1915, five years before the rest of the country followed suit, but that didn’t mean a whole lot, since Alabamans always talked dry and drank wet. Voters thought that prohibiting alcohol was the Christian thing to do, since it might help people whose spirits were willing but whose flesh was weak. But there were plenty of folks who were Christians on Sunday morning and dancers and drinkers on Saturday night, and if somebody wanted hooch, he (or she) knew right where to go to get it.