The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

Darling itself had a great many trees, which helped to make it beautiful. While Buddy was no expert on the matter, he subscribed to the opinion that when a town’s surroundings were clean and pleasant, people were more contented and less likely to commit crimes. Of course, there would always be a few malcontents complaining about this and that and the other thing, and occasional terrible crimes, like what had happened to Rona Jean. But for the most part, people thought their little town was a fine place to live, especially now that the camp was established and there were more jobs and more money to spend. And soon there would be more trees, thanks to the CCC boys.

Trees had been an important part of Darling’s life from the very beginning. The town was nestled in the gently rolling hills a few miles east of the Alabama River and seventy miles north of Mobile. Buddy had often heard Bessie Bloodworth, the town’s historian, tell the story of its founding. According to her, it had been established in the early 1800s by Joseph P. Darling, a Virginian who was following a faint wagon trail through the area. With him were his wife, five children, two slaves, a team of oxen, a pair of milk cows, and a horse. Joseph P. was on his way to create a cotton plantation on the Mississippi River, but his wife was sick and tired of bouncing along in that wagon day in and day out, baking biscuits over a campfire and washing diapers in a lard bucket. At this point in her story, Bessie would repeat what she thought Mrs. Darling might have said.

“You can do as you like, Mr. Darling, but I am not ridin’ another mile in that blessed wagon. If you’re lookin’ for your meals and your washin’ to be done reg’lar, right here is where you’ll find ’em.”

Mr. Darling (who was fond of his grub and liked a clean shirt every now and then) surveyed the dense stands of timber and the fertile soils, the nearby river and the fast-flowing creek beside which they were camped, and—all things considered, but especially the grub—decided that the little valley might be a good place to live, after all. He cut down enough pine trees to build a barn and two log cabins, a big one for his family and a small one for his slaves. Then (because Mr. Darling’s interests took an entrepreneurial turn) he cut down more trees and built the Darling General Store (now Mann’s Mercantile). Then he ordered some store stock, put on an apron, and waited for the customers to come.

And come they did. In those early days, the hills were covered with a virgin forest of loblolly and longleaf pines, with sweet gum and tulip trees in the river bottom, and magnolia and sassafras and sycamore and pecan anywhere their roots could find good water. Hearing that the timber was so fine, Mr. Darling’s cousin came from Virginia to build a sawmill, so that all those pine trees could be turned into boards for houses and barns. And houses and barns were needed, because the settlers who had also heard of the plentiful timber and fertile soil were also on their way.

Since the settlers were mostly farmers, they cleared the land for crops by cutting even more trees. In fact, over the next few decades, lumber became a very profitable business, in part because the Alabama River could be used to float the logs in huge rafts down to the port city of Mobile, on Mobile Bay. Before long, the lumber industry in Mobile was loading millions of feet of sawn boards on ships bound for Cuba, Europe, South America, and even the California gold fields. About the same time, the demand for paper began to rise, and paper mills sprouted like mushrooms throughout Alabama’s forests, turning the low-grade timber to paper and shipping it via the newly built railroads to major cities all over the country.