Days 17 and 18

 Days 17-18, Friday, May 7-8

 We started the day at the Big Blue Café in Auburn where we had breakfast.  The café was located on Toomer's Corner which is where the trees are covered in toilet paper following a win by Auburn Tigers football team.  Apparently the town budget actually has a line for toilet paper removal!

Leaving Auburn we headed to Horshoe Bend National Military Park, where Donald Trump's favorite president slaughtered 800 uppity Creek Indians who didn't want to give up their land.  

The visitors' center was closed due to a power outage, however, we were able to take an audio tour of the area which explained in detail the battle, or slaughter if you will.  Jackson's victory led to his promotion to general.  He was also a slave owner, and one of his accomplishments as President was to force all the Indians from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee to move to Oklahoma.  This forced migration is better known as the "Trail of Tears."

Leaving Horseshoe Bend, we headed to Birmingham, stopping for lunch at Peach Park which is kind of like aSouth of the Border or Polly’s Pancakes,  but the focus is on peach products.  Our chicken was not very good, but the peach ice cream and peach cobbler were much better.  Inside the restaurant there were photos of all of the Peach Queens and Peach Princesses.   Beauty pageants are obviously still big around here.

Birmingham is Alabama’s largest city, and it prospered in the late 1800’s due to the abundance of coal and iron in the surrounding hills.  There is obviously still a lot of money in the area,  lots of beautiful neighborhoods, with plenty of Whole Foods and brokerage firms.  

 

We arrived in Birmingham around 3 pm, so we found a great local bakery/café  where we  bought a baguette for dinner and some cookies!    We enjoyed some cold drinks at the outdoor tables at the café while I worked on my blog, and then headed south to our campground in Oak Mountain State Park, which is Alabama’s largest state park.  The park was beautiful, with lots of facilities including a golf course and mountain bike trails.  The campsites were a little cramped and the bathrooms weren’t that clean, but we were happy to be there.

We felt this way when we bought our first van.

When we woke up on Saturday, we headed for a local breakfast diner where we just a mediocre meal.  From there we headed to Vulcan Park, which is the home of the world’s largest cast iron statue.  The statue of Vulcan was created for the Birmingham display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.  We took an elevator to the top of the statue where I got some great pix of the Birmingham skyline.   Such heights still bother me so we didn’t stay long, just long enough to snap some photos.

 

At the base of the statue is a museum that focuses on the iron industry and how it affected the city’s.  On display were many photos of the miners who were paid pennies for miserable, back breaking work.  

 

Birmingham was also Alabama’s most segregated city and the museum displayed the differences between the working conditions, pay, and health care, schools, and  housing conditions.

Leaving Vulcan, we headed to the 16^th Street Baptist Church which became the focal point of the civil rights struggle in the city when four young girls were killed when members of the KKK dynamited the church.  Described by Martin Luther King Jr. as "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity",[5] the explosion at the church killed four girls and injured between 14 and 22 other people.

Although the FBI had concluded in 1965 that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing had been committed by four known Klansmen and segregationists: Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry,[6] no prosecutions were conducted until 1977, when Robert Chambliss was tried and convicted of the first-degree murder of one of the victims, 11-year-old Carol Denise McNair.

After the bombing, the people of Wales, donated a beautiful stained glass window picturing a black Jesus.  The Welch government kept the maximum donation to a half crown, less than a dollar, so that the window would truly represent the people of Wales.  Unfortunately the church was closed due to COVID, so we could not go inside.

 Across from the church is the Kelly Ingram Park which contains bronze statues of some of the most significant events in the civil rights struggle, and next to the park we visited the Civil Rights Institute which also focused in depth on the history of the civil rights movement in Birmingham.  Although there was a lot of duplication from what we had witnessed for the past three days, the horrors of segregation cannot be stressed enough and should never be forgotten.

Leaving Birmingham, we headed to the northeast corner of Alabama to DeSoto State Park, arriving in time to have a relaxing even complete with a campfire.  We will be at this park for three days, and we are very impressed by it.

DeSoto State Park campsite