Fort Payne, AL – We crossed another state today, still on a diagonal route on Interstate 59 from southwest to northeast. Once again, we had lovely weather, reaching a balmy 22 degrees at its warmest. Signs of spring are everywhere, with blossoming trees and scores of robins. At the rest stop where we had our lunch, there were fragrant hyacinths and jaunty daffodils blooming in the flowerbeds!
Alabama’s nickname is “the heart of Dixie”, and we passed through towns with well-known names, such as Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Each place we pass through has a depth of history, from the times of the aboriginal peoples through the Civil War and on into more recent times. In these parts, those times include the difficult years of racial discrimination and unrest that captured so many headlines in the 1960s.
There was no sign of those events in the peaceful towns we passed, where many tall white steeples stood out on the skyline, and where church parking lots were filled with the cars of Sunday worshippers. Not everyone was in church, however – the highway had a lot of cars and semi trucks that whizzed past us as we stuck to our steady 62 miles per hour. The condition of the roadbed was not the greatest; there were a lot of rough patches, and Val had gusts of wind to contend with as well, but he handled it beautifully as usual.
It was fun reading the names of towns we passed – trying to figure out how the locals would pronounce them. Names like Boligee, Eutaw and Attalla. We only had a couple of occasions to interact with the locals – at the filling station where we fueled up and again with the host of this RV park – but I could have listened to their lovely southern twang for ages. I suppose we sounded as odd to them as they did to us.
Fort Payne is 20 miles west of the Alabama-Georgia state line, and it originated in the 1830s with a fort for the internment of Cherokee Indians (as they are known here) during their forced migration to Oklahoma from the eastern states – a sad chapter of US history called the Trail of Tears. The town boomed for a time in the 1880s when coal and iron deposits were discovered, but they proved to be smaller than originally anticipated.
The town’s biggest claim to fame began in the early 1900s when a hosiery factory set up business here, and before long Fort Payne was producing more than half the socks made in the United States! When Chinese socks flooded the market, the town leaders began to diversify local industry to stabilize its economy. Judging from the contented look of the place and its many shopping malls, their plan appears to have worked.
The well-known country music band Alabama, from the 1960s, called Fort Payne its headquarters, and it still has a strong fan base here. We like this spot for its peaceful RV park, which we’ll call home for the next few hours before we move on.
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