Dale County AlArchives News.....Portrait of A Region... 1888 March 30 1983
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Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 April 24, 2004, 4:10 pm

Southern Star
THE SOUTHERN STAR Wed., March 30, 1983-2B

History Corner

       Portrait Of A Region ...1888
     By Creel Richardson
         Part II

  From the pen of C.C. correspondent of Montgomery Advertiser)

  At present Ozark has seven or eight hundred people doing a merchantile
business around a pretty court house square. It is 200 feet above the sea level 
and as lovely a town site as the country affords. Being in southeast Alabama, 
the water is, of course, purity itself. The stranger puts up at Mr. Painter's 
Transient Hotel, is fed on tender beef, home made syrup, fresh country butter. 
Dale County ham, and other good things is keeping and sleeps on a bed made of 
Dale County feathers or Dale County cotton, he hardly knows which.
  When a man down here wants a new mattress, he takes an even hundred
pounds of seed cotton to a public gin, one that has a condenser. He spreads his 
cloth out before the condenser and as the cotton comes out in a wide flat roll, 
it is spread backwards and forwards until his hundred pounds is all ginned. 
Then comes the top cloth and stitching, etc. Somebody told me this morning 
there wasn't a bought mattress in the county.
  The people educate their children at what they say is the finest school in 
Alabama. As it takes a mighty good school to please everybody, and as
everybody here is more than pleased and even proud of the school, I have no 
sort of doubt that it is as good as any academy in the State.
  The good people here do their worship in three churches- Baptist,
Methodist and Hardshell, and all the buildings are creditable structures.
  The school and the churches and the neat and tasteful homes show at a
glance what sort of people live in Ozark.
  The town gets about 2,000 bales of cotton, which it hauls forty miles to 
Eufaula. All its goods come from the same place. What an enormous drain this is 
on the time and energies of a people! Every hundred pounds of freight costs 
them 75cent from Eufaula, yet the Ozark merchant has prospered. There are men 
here good for close on to $100,000 and when the Midland came to the front the 
town subscribed $35,000 in collectable notes. And the marvel of it is, that 
while all of us know sections on the railroad where the farmers haven't grown 
rich, those in Dale have hauled their goods to and fro from far off Troy and 
Eufaula and are getting better off each year. One thing, though, they don't 
haul, and that is corn.
  The prospect of one or more railroads sent things up whizzing.
  About six years ago the city sold a lot near the square at auction, and 
knocked it down to the highest bidder for $10. He never paid the money and 
never got his title. A short time since he went up with the money and asked for 
a deed, but, the city ruled him out, threw the lot on the market again and got 
$700 for it.'Lots on the square here, that never had any price until now, are 
not on the market at $500 apiece.
  A merchant by the name of Garner has fixed his name in history by building 
the first brick store in Ozark and somebody else is clearing the ground to 
build two more.
  These people reason this way: We have gone along and done well hauling
everything 40 miles from Eufaula. We have prospered and made considerably
more than a living, though the cotton and trade from our very doors went off 35 
or 40 miles to a market. With a railroad we will command the whole
business for 15-20 miles all around to the south for an indefinite distance. 
Ozark will be the nearest market for over 10,000 bales of cotton and the trade 
that implies.
  On the whole, I know no town now in Alabama whose dreams are so rosy
as those of Ozark. She has waited patiently and long for the sunshine now 
streaming full in her face.
  
   From the newspaper files of Harold Stephens.
   Typed & submitted by Christine G. Thacker.
   Permission to post any Southern Star article or pictures given            by 
Mr Joseph Adams, Owner, April.23, 2004.


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