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MOBILE, ALABAMA
State: Alabama
County: Mobile
Founded: 1702
Incorporated: 1814Mobile was a struggling community of three hundred inhabitants, mostly Creoles, when it was taken over by the Americans in 1813. A few years later, when population began to spread along its tributary rivers, it began to grow and in 1819 numbered eight hundred inhabitants. In 1823 this number had increased to nearly three thousand. Most of the higher class of Creoles had left when Spanish rule ended, and the new population was made up of Americans of every type. Merchants came largely from the North, adventurers gathered from every quarter, and the mixture, according to some visitors at least, was not attractive.
In place of the one wharf of Creole days, there were a dozen by 1823. Markets were built and brick structures beganto replace wooden buildings. Because of obstruction in the harbor, ships of the larger class entered with difficulty. This fact made it necessary for the town to confine its shipping largely to the coastwise traffic. Fruits from Cuba were to be found in the markets and a regular trade with New York was established at an early date, but a large part of the cotton which was destined for Europe had to be sent to New Orleans for shipment.
While Alabama was divided into two commercial sections by her rivers, the roads which connected her with the rest of the country did not tend to draw these two sections together. There were two main routes of travel connecting Washington with New Orleans: the one which passed through Richmond, Raleigh, Columbia, Milledgeville, and Montgomery to Mobile; and the one which passed into the Valley of Virginia at Rockfish Gap, threaded the Valley and then followed the course of the Holston to Knoxville.
Most of the travelers journeying from the East to New Orleans took the route through the Southern capitals. Some of them, instead of going all the way to Mobile before embarking, took boat at Montgomery and made the circuitous voyage down the river rather than endure longer the hardships of the road. Hodgson, who passed this way in 1820, took the land route to Mobile but Lafayette took the water course when he came in 1825, and so did the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-who followed in 1828.
Mobile is the only seaport in Alabama.