Come with me. I want to show you what a hole in Alabama history looks like.
Downtown Eufaula is postcard pretty. It fits the Hollywood idea of what a small Southern town is supposed to look like, so much so that the producers of that “Sweet Home Alabama” movie took some footage here years ago, although they shot the scenes with Reese Witherspoon across the river, in Georgia.
According to the Alabama Department of Transportation, this road is the busiest state highway in Alabama, and if you close your eyes, you might mistake its sounds and smells for a big city rather than a quaint river town. This is how impatient beachgoers get from Atlanta to Panama City, and where semis and log trucks belch diesel fumes as they rumble in both directions. But turn your head, look out the passenger side window, and you can see the same 15-second clip Hollywood came here for 20 years ago.
On either side of Eufaula Avenue are rows of antebellum mansions that have their own names, imparted by owners who are long since dead. The director of the state tourism department once said the houses looked like wedding cakes. Most, but not all, are in excellent shape, restored by new owners who are as much curators as they are residents.
Lines of old oak trees form a natural canopy over the road. The residents are protective of these trees, many of which memorialize deceased townspeople with small granite markers laid like gravestones among their roots. One tree owns itself, or so a little plaque there says, and there’s even a tiny fence to keep us off its lawn.
Yes, there is history in Eufaula. But there’s something missing.
The most significant memorial in Eufaula is the one that isn’t here. Just a little further down Eufaula Avenue — past that Confederate monument and around the corner from the fish — is the site of a tragedy.
Where today the air reeks with car exhaust, there was gunsmoke.
Where traffic creeps between stoplights, bodies lined the street.
In the median of that busy road was once a massacre.
Here is where Alabama took a bloody turn, something so shocking at the time that it led to two Congressional investigations. It might be the most consequential thing that ever happened in this town.
But you won’t find mention of it — not here, not now.
Step into my time machine. There’s something important I want to show you.
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