Alabama Trivia & Tidbits - Page 11

Looking for Alabama trivia? Try our list Alabama little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Sylacauga (pop. 12,616) is built atop a 32-mile deposit of hard, white marble, which has been used in buildings nationwide, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

first appeared: 4/20/2003

The 1840 post office in Mooresville (pop. 59) is the state’s oldest operating post office.

first appeared: 4/13/2003

The official state Bible, bought in 1853, has been used for the inauguration of every governor since that time. In 1861, Jefferson Davis used it to take his oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America.

first appeared: 4/6/2003

At 93, Elsie Chandler is the state’s oldest working librarian and runs the Oscar Johnson Memorial Library in Silverhill (pop. 616).

first appeared: 3/30/2003

Ella Smith’s doll factory in Roanoke (pop. 6,563) produced 8,000 to 10,000 dolls a year in the early 1900s, using her patented method of plaster and fiber. The dolls are known by several names: Alabama Indestructible, Ella Smith, and Roanoke Doll.

first appeared: 3/23/2003

Toothpaste, wedding dresses, and hockey sticks are sold at the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro (pop. 14,762) where lost or unclaimed airline baggage from across the country lands after 90 days. Among valuable finds (or losses) are bagpipes and an ancient burial mask.

first appeared: 3/16/2003

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg was born in 1959 in Piedmont (pop. 5,120) and pays tribute to his Southern mother in his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’.

first appeared: 3/9/2003

Built in 1897, the three-story Victorian gothic Pauly Jail in Union Springs (pop. 3,670) survives today as a museum.

first appeared: 3/2/2003

Free city services for residents of Pollard (pop. 120) include water, trash pickup, brush cutting, and dead cow removal. After oil was discovered in 1952, the city invested the oil-tax revenue and built a $1 million nest egg for such services.

first appeared: 2/23/2003

In 1838, John McKinley, a founder of Florence (pop. 36,264), became the first U.S. Supreme Court justice from Alabama.

first appeared: 2/16/2003

In 1923, Loraine Tunstall became the first woman in Alabama to head a state governmental department, as director of its Child Welfare Department.

first appeared: 2/9/2003

The Alabama Wildlife Rehabilitation Center is the state’s oldest wildlife clinic and treats more than 3,000 injured or orphaned creatures each year. It was founded in 1977 and has been located inside Oak Mountain State Park in Pelham (pop. 14,369) since 1987.

first appeared: 2/2/2003

The state’s oldest continuing community theater, in its 56th season, is the Joe Jefferson Players in Mobile.

first appeared: 1/26/2003

The University of Alabama opened its doors to 52 students April 13, 1831. By the end of the year the student body, taught by a four-person faculty, had reached 100.

first appeared: 1/19/2003

St. Stephens, on the lower Tombigbee River, served as the first capital of what is now Alabama. Established as a fort in the 1790s, Old St. Stephens is now a historical park.

first appeared: 1/12/2003

America’s Junior Miss is headquartered in Mobile. What began in the 1920s as part of a flower festival has blossomed into the nation’s oldest and largest girls’ scholarship program.

first appeared: 1/5/2003

Dr. William Crawford Gorgas, born in Mobile in 1854, pioneered the fight against yellow fever, halting an early 1900s epidemic in the Panama Canal Zone.

first appeared: 12/29/2002

The University of Montevallo in Montevallo (pop. 4,825) opened Oct. 12, 1896, as the Alabama Girls’ Industrial School—the first state-supported technical school devoted to training girls how to make a living.

first appeared: 12/22/2002

Born in 1834 in South Carolina, Dr. Peter Bryce was Alabama’s first psychiatrist. His pioneering treatment and humane patient care became a basis for modern psychiatry.

first appeared: 12/15/2002

In 1901, the Alabama Department of Archives and History became the nation’s first state-funded archival agency and served as a model for others.

first appeared: 12/8/2002

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