Fort Payne Alabama

The Southern Railway Depot

A few years ago, A. & I were headed to Birmingham AL in order to attend the wedding of a cousin of hers. As I was doing my “guidebook research” in the AAA Guidebook on the lookout for interesting stops to make along the way, I was struck by the entry for Ft. Payne AL. Among the attractions listed was this Richardson Romanesque Depot originally constructed by the Southern Railway when it was under the guidance and control of J.P. Morgan.

Ft. Payne AL has a fairly long history for that region, since it was originally a Cherokee town called “Willstown” named for its headman, a man by the name of “Will.” During that early period it was most noteworthy for being one of the homes of the famous Cherokee, Sequoyah, the “inventor” of their “syllabary.” During the 1830’s a unit of the US Army under the command of Major John Payne built a fort here. The purpose of the fort was to provide a place for the internment of the Cherokee immediately prior to their beginning the infamous and sad “Trail of Tears” which led them from their native homelands to the Oklahoma Territory. After the Cherokee were removed, the name of the town was changed to that of the Fort that had been established here.

During the Civil War this area was relatively untouched by Union Forces (as indeed most of Alabama escaped destruction). This was because it was perceived by the Union Generals that the area lacked few areas of strategic importance.

After the hostilities were ended, the great financier J.P. Morgan began organizing a railroad he called “The Southern Railway” out of the totally segmented railway system operating in the south. As part of his efforts, he had agents for his new line scouting the route of the track for potential “business opportunities” that would create traffic for his railroad.

Ft. Payne was found to be in an area containing both coal and iron ore resources. And so, in the 1890’s Ft. Payne experienced a real “boom.” The Southern Railway, seeking to maximize the extent of the boom for its benefit had this substantial Richardson Romanesque Depot built in 1891. I suppose the thinking was: “We could just put up a standard-issue wooden depot, such as can be found in many places even today. But we are trying to attract Northern financiers to the area, and we must go the extra mile and constructing this type of depot. If you make it substantial, and more like what the Northern financiers are used to seeing at home (Richardson Romanesque architecture was the prevailing style for public buildings constructed during that era), then the chances are better that they will bring their business to Ft. Payne Alabama.”

The Southern Railway was, in short, a privately-owned, privately financed, economic development council. This Depot was seen as one of their “economic development tools.” The idea behind constructing it was: “The First Impression is the best one.”

This same idea, no doubt was on the minds of the economic development folks in Indianapolis Indiana when they recently re-did their city’s international airport. In this case, they opened a new terminal building, the Col. H. Weir Cook terminal building, that houses not only gates for folks to use when catching their airplane flights, but also stores, eateries, and a giant civic plaza the includes a huge sculpture entitled: “The Cardinal” (The Cardinal is the state bird of Indiana. It is also the name of the only Amtrak train that services the Indianapolis area, “The Cardinal.”). I expect that the thinking was: “Make a good first impression, that is what a community needs to do in order to experience economic development (that and give the local economy away by giving large tax breaks to those precious new business developments).”

Two communities 100+ years apart with the same approach, for sure, but with a major difference. In Ft. Payne, in the 1890’s, economic development through maximizing the transportation infrastructure (I believe that is the current jargon) was done by a private corporation using capital they had raised on the financial markets. In Indianapolis, and most other communities across the United States today, it is done by the taxpayers of Indianapolis, of Indiana, any I also suspect by the U.S.

Now, I am sure that many would argue that there were many abuses and mistakes made with the economic development experienced in the 1890’s under the guidance of private investors. In this particular instance, the coal and iron ore deposits proved to be very thin, and by the early 1900’s most of the mines and mills associated with the minerals were out of business. But I sometimes wonder, particularly as the US Congress works up the an even newer economic stimulus plan, not to be confused with the last one, if there are not just as many faults, perhaps even more, with the new public-funded economic development that is in vogue now. Only no one will know about it for at least 10 to 20 years.