About Alabama

In Alabama you will see the old Confederate flag in many places, and monuments to soldiers who died in the Confederate armies. The Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, was from Alabama, and the capital of Alabama, Montgomery, for a short time was also capital of the Confederacy, back in 1861. The churches are very important in the social life of people in Alabama. Nearly everyone goes to Sunday School and to church, and especially in the smaller towns people have their clubs and parties and picnics through their churches.

If you meet someone who comes from Alabama, you still can't be sure what his home country looks like until you find out what part of the state he lives in. The southern, the central and the northern parts of Alabama are quite different. The southern part is the "Black Belt" section. At the very southern end, of course, Alabama has a seacoast—a very short one, where long, deep, Mobile Bay runs north from the Gulf of Mexico to the city of Mobile, second-biggest city in the state. Near the seacoast there is sandy soil, as there usually is near the ocean; and there are forests of pecan and other trees; and there are swamps and marshes where many alligators live. A few miles above this region begins a "belt" of rich, black topsoil, twenty to fifty miles or more wide.

This beltlike strip of land winds northward to the central part of the state. It is the blackness of its soil that gave it the name "Black Belt." Once it was considered one of the finest cottonraising places on earth. But the farmers used to have such bad years when the cotton crop failed, or when cotton prices fell too low, that they now raise peanuts and vegetables and other crops, as well as cotton, and they are much better off than they were. The central part of the state is the "Coal Mountain" section. Driving through this part, you are likely to see coal miners with axes on their shoulders and lamps on the fronts of their caps, just as you would in western Pennsylvania. There is much iron ore in those mountains, too, and other valuable minerals. In the center of this section is