Memphis

"In the late eighteen hundreds Memphis, twelve miles down the river from Pickensville, reached its zenith. There were stores on each side of Cotton Street that extended three blocks up from the landing, and Cotton Street was ninety-nine feet wide. The Gus Coleman store was the largest. He was doing a rip-rearing business at that time. His brother-in-law, Tom Windom, said that Coleman was too stingy to have a fire in the store in the wintertime, and when his sons Jim, Oliver, Pete, Hugh, and Windom complained, he would just show them where the whiskey barrel was. The first postmaster was a Mr. Kidd, who was appointed in eighteen and forty-four. James William Wallace with his parents John M. A. Wallace and Margaret McClanahan Crockett Wallace, founded Memphis in eighteen and forty-one. This was a very prominent family. Mr. Wallace was a planter, a scientist, and an inventor, having invented the oscillating cotton gin. He is buried along with other members of his family in the Memphis Cemetery. These monuments, sculptured from Italian marble, tell the story of the Wallace family. Mr. Wallace even surveyed the town, and ran off thirty blocks, naming the streets, and subdivided it into lots. Mr. J. P. Parker was the Justice of the Peace that tried many of the cases in, uh, around Old Memphis. Byrd Ivey was said to be the richest man in I, uh, Memphis, and instead of speaking of someone as being rich and comparing him to J. Goule or the Rockefellers, they would say that Ahe's almost as rich as Byrd Ivey.

Now old Memphis was built right in a U-turn in the river, and ideal place for a town and ferry and a landing. The Windom family moved to this area after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit was signed, and, uh, the Indians were no longer a threat. This family, originally from Virginia, moved to South Carolina prior to the move to Alabama in eighteen twelve. Walter D. Windom, the son of Hugh G. and Eliza D. Windom, was born in Pickens County in eighteen fifty-two, grew up during the dark days of Reconstruction, and saw his family lose everything they possessed. This instilled in him a determination to rid the South of Carpetbaggers, and to re-establish a Democratic Party, and no man in south Pickens devoted more time to swaying the elections to the Democratic side. He was elected senator in eighteen ninety-eight. The Windom name is synonymous with the history of Memphis and Fairfield. Old Memphis had warehouses, a hotel, a post office, doctor's offices, and a school, and one of the earliest teachers was the grandmother of Mrs. Ernestine Parker here in Macon. One of the doctors, there was the three best-known doctors were Dr. R. R. Wyatt, Dr. Hopkins, and Dr. Graham. Dr. Wyatt wrote The Autobiography of a Little Man.

Memphis is also not far from the spot where the followers of Napoleon built a fort as they made plans to bring Napoleon to this area. It was occupied by a French family until Napoleon died in eighteen twenty-one, and finally destroyed by an explosion in eighteen thirty. A news item from the West Alabamian, September twentieth, eighteen sixty-seven, tells of eight stores in Memphis that had burned the night before. This followed the War Between the States when the arsonists ran rampant through the South. But another article in eighteen seventy-nine announces the improvements being made in the, uh, Old Memphis, such as the Wade Hopkins' Drug Store, Mr. C. J. Wallace Store and Warehouses, improvements to the Wyatt, Everett, Archer, Cook, and Parker property, uh, properties. At this time there were fifty families living in Old Memphis, but as old settlers moved away and railroads put an end to river traffic Memphis gradually became a ghost town. Mr. Jim Parker was the last white citizen to live there.

Hebron Church, which stands between Memphis and Dancey, was at an early day the center of social, political, and religious activity of that vicinity. A preacher once said that there was more playing than praying in this church. It was the setting for some of the most beautiful weddings in the county."