About the Book
Southside relates the stories of the cotton mill workers and their families who lived and worked in Eufaula, Alabama, a small town on the Chattahoochee River, from the 1890s through 1945. Utilizing previously unpublished family records, oral histories, and other primary sources, author David Alsobrook relates the stories of the lives of these ordinary mill families—their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies.
Readers will discover that many Southsiders closely resemble their own families. The Cowikee Mill Community House, established in 1918, provided a variety of recreational and educational programs for Southsiders-bands, baseball teams, a kindergarten, Scout troops, and social clubs. The Community House and the two “mission” churches became the centers of social life in Southside. After the 1920s on, the popularity of Community House programs throughout Eufaula expedited the eradication of the barriers of caste and class between textile families and other residents.
The book also provides an in-depth historical examination of Eufaula’s race relations, racial violence, and the impact of the Civil War and the Myth of the Lost Cause on the town’s future evolution. Readers who are interested in the Great Depression and World War II will find much detail about these eras, how they dramatically altered the lives of everyone in this small town, and abolished the antiquated system of ostracism of mill families.
Many of the photographs that appear in Southside are from personal family collections and have never been seen previously. Alsobrook’s chapter on legendary mill owner Donald Comer presents a fresh assessment of this remarkably enlightened corporate executive and his own particular brand of paternalism, which differed significantly from the philosophy of many of his contemporaries in the Southern textile industry.
About the Author :
David Ernest Alsobrook was born in Eufaula, Alabama, and grew up in Mobile. He completed his formal education at Auburn University (PhD) and West Virginia University (MA). His primary historical research interests are Southern politics, social life, and race relations. Alsobrook served as an archivist at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, supervisory archivist at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and as the first director of the George H.W. Bush, and William J. Clinton Presidential Libraries. He currently lives in Mobile, Alabama.
Review :
David Alsobrook was inspired to write this important social history-the story of the Southside mill village in the Alabama town of Eufaula-in part by the tales and memories of his grandmother, Oma Parish Alsobrook, who spent forty years working in the mills. Thus is the meticulous research of the historian enriched by stories that are rooted in the heart. This is, in part, a history of class prejudice and the human inclination toward exclusion, but it is also the story of a community-really a story of the whole notion of community-with all its flaws, complications, and strengths. Alsobrook's graceful prose alone makes this book a pleasure to read. But even more important is the story it tells, which should not be forgotten, and might have been, if not for the author's decision to preserve it.-Frye Gaillard, writer-in-residence, University of South Alabama
David Alsobrook's splendid recreation of life in the textile mill village on the south side of Eufaula, Alabama, is one of the finest studies of class and culture in the South between 1890 and 1945 to be published in my lifetime. The title underestimates the depth and importance of his analysis of an antebellum cotton export town and center of state secessionism, where racial caste defined all relationships, to a major textile mill center where white class tensions in churches, families, commercial establishments, politics, schools, and all other social institutions defined identity. Drawing heavily on his own family's stories as well as those of many other successful offspring of the mill people, he writes a brilliant history from the bottom up. -Wayne Flynt, distinguished professor emeritus of History, Auburn University
Southside is a sensitive and moving story of an Alabama mill village that fills a gap in our understanding of the social and economic challenges of mill workers living in a larger community of privileged citizens. -Leah Rawls Atkins, director emerita, Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the
Arts & Humanities, Auburn University
Inspired by his own family history, David Alsobrook chronicles the lives of the cotton mill operatives who lived in the Southside neighborhood of Eufaula, Alabama, from the 1880s to the end of World War II. He weaves their stories together with great compassion while analyzing the rise and fall of the social division between the Southsiders and "Old Eufaula" in prose that is both rigorous and accessible. This is a valuable addition to local history and the history of the cotton mill economy of the South. -Martin T. Olliff, associate professor of History and director of The Wiregrass Archives, Troy University Dothan
Just excellent. Deeply felt, beautifully researched and written. Eufaula's Southsiders have their bard, and a good one, in David Alsobrook.
-John Sledge, author of Southern Bound and The Mobile River
Forget dry, condescending, abstract histories of Southern milltowns! David Alsobrook presents a lively, crisply written and coherent account of this exemplary-in ways bad and good-Southern community. He artfully joins magisterial and personal perspectives in a story that stands as a model of scholarship that will serve and enlighten an array of audiences.
-Jerry Elijah Brown, dean and professor emeritus of Journalism, The University of Montana
