ALABAMA'S VINE AND OLIVE COLONY

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2006 by Blaufarb, Rafe

By the beginning of 1819, only sixty-nine settlers had come to the grant; a year later they numbered only 108. Who were these brave souls? A few were military officers who had resisted Lallemand's blandishments. A greater number were immigrants from France itself. But the largest group were former refugees from St. Domingue. For them, settlement in Alabama meant the possibility of achieving a lifestyle they had known in the French Caribbean. But this lifestyle had little to do with grapevines and olive trees; rather, it revolved around slavery. Slavery was very much on the minds of the new colonists. Within twenty-four hours of her arrival in Mobile in December 1819, Madame Victoire George found "a Negro woman" and purchased her on credit. Once on the grant, Madame George became even more determined to acquire slaves. "I see it more and more," she wrote. "The whites who come here ask more wages than we can possibly give them; they all want to be farmers on their own account and they are quite right to do so if they can." The solution to this dilemma was obvious to this former inhabitant of St. Domingue: "We must absolutely have Negroes to cultivate our land." Those with sufficient funds thus purchased slaves to clear their allotments. Those without struggled on their own, toiling heroically but hopelessly to tame the wilderness.

The cost of purchasing slaves was the heaviest, but by no means the only, startup expense for the colonists. While waiting for their lands to be cleared, they had to purchase food and build houses. Food was very expensive because it had to be brought from distant markets. One of the most successful colonists, Frederic Ravesies, recalled that in the early days a bushel of corn cost five dollars. To keep these costs down, it was recommended that settlers bring with them to Alabama a six-month supply of provisions. Even those who followed this advice still found it necessary to plant the first acres they cleared with corn rather than with grapevines, olive trees, or cotton. The corn crops did not always do well. The 1818 crop was a total failure, forcing the colonists to purchase seed corn to try again the following year. The 1819 crop was damaged by frost, that of 1821 suffered from flooding, and the nearly mature 1822 crop was devastated by a late summer storm. In addition to putting food on the table, the other main task the settlers had to accomplish was to provide themselves with shelter. They generally built log cabins, which were little more than lean-to's. One observer commented that, although exorbitantly expensive, these dwellings were "not fine, nor do they last long." After ten years of settlement, the largest structure on the grant was still a log cabin measuring only nineteen by twenty-three feet. The greatest challenge the first settlers faced was bare survival.

Their efforts were complicated by a surveying error. The first party of colonists had chosen the high ground above the juncture of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers as their townsite and named it Demopolis (City of the People). But when the official survey of the area was completed in August 1818, it revealed that Demopolis lay outside of the grant's boundaries. The French thus had to abandon their promising riverside town and establish a new capital further inland. They called it Aigleville (Eagle City), a name that evoked both the Napoleonic Empire and the republic of the United States. Several years later, Frédéric Ravesies established a second town, Arcola, on his land. Neither Aigleville nor Arcola thrived. The settlers preferred the more prosperous settlements of Demopolis and Greensboro. Today, a concrete plant sits on the former site of Aigleville.