I haven’t been getting out much lately, since I decided last year to give up my truck to my 16-year-old son. He and I had spent the year that he was 15 getting up early together to get him to football workouts, and it seemed wiser to let him take over the task.  What that meant for me was: I would be staying pretty close to home. No more road trips for a while.

Recently, though, it was a fortuitous circumstance that led my wife and I to Russell County on the eastern edge of Alabama, just on our side of the state line from Columbus, Georgia. Near the small town of Fort Mitchell, the sisters at Blessed Trinity Shrine Retreat had made a call for volunteers to do some heavy lifting on-site, so we went down with a small group on a recent Saturday morning.

Because of how Alabama’s leaders situated our interstate highways in the 1960s, there are large sections of the state that are not reachable by interstate. Southeastern Alabama is one of those sections. Often called the Wiregrass, this area constitutes the eastern edge of the Black Belt, and south of that are thousands of acres that came to be used for grazing livestock.  For those who may have read it, Jefferson Cowie’s recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book Freedom’s Dominion dives into the history of Barbour County, which is in the same area along the Chattahoochee on the state line with Georgia. Where we were headed was the county just north of that one.

After meeting the other volunteers a little before sunrise, we left Montgomery on I-85 then veered south at the Opelika exit where US 280 moves through suburbs and rolling hills. Opelika is the seat of Lee County and a sister city to Auburn, where one of the state’s two large universities is located. Auburn is a land-grant university founded as a “polytechnic” right after the Civil War. Today, it is a very large university with strong agricultural, veterinary, and engineering programs. Being adjacent, Opelika has become something of bedroom community as housing prices in Auburn continually go up. There were 11,420 people living Opelika in 1970, and there are about 32,000 now. In more recent decades, the larger area of Lee County has been a site of tremendous growth. There were 115,000 people in 2000 and 175,000 today, an increase of over 50% in twenty-five years. Among the signs of this growth and development are the now-ubiquitous interstate exits, like the one we passed, cluttered with gas stations and chain places. On the brighter side, the city is also home to local establishments like Red Clay Brewing and John Emerald Distillery, two of my favorite producers.

Since 85 ambles to the northeast from Montgomery to Atlanta, highways 80, 280, and 431 offer the speediest ways through and around this part of the state. On 280, passing by the tiny community of Salem, we approached Phenix City. Road signs along the way point to the turn toward Seale, the home of Butch Anthony and his Museum of Wonder. In earlier days, from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, Anthony held an annual folk-art and music festival called Doo-Nanny on his family farm. Though that doesn’t happen anymore, the artist continues his own work, transforming a whole slew of Southern myths and narratives into something like modern art: quirky and irreverent, yet steeped in a place.

Passing through Phenix City on 280/431 today, one might never guess at its storied history. In the years during and after World War II, the small river town was a notorious den of sin that offered some of the seedier attractions to soldiers at nearby Fort Benning. In an attempt to clean the place up, then-Alabama attorney general Albert Patterson went to work against organized crime operations there, and as a result, he was murdered in 1954. That murder set off a chain of events that would affect state – and national – history. After his death, Albert Patterson’s son John stepped into the AG’s job and, with popular support, succeeded in cleaning up Phenix City. That success led to his election as governor in 1958, defeating a rural populist who was then known as “the little fighting judge,” Barbour County’s George C. Wallace. Wallace then became determined not be beaten again in 1962 and so adopted the most vehement segregationist rhetoric he could muster in the rematch. Using an array of beliefs, myths, and narratives about race, fairness, and work ethic, he won the state’s highest office and carried on with his stated positions throughout the 1960s. The now-infamous Stand in the Schoolhouse Door in 1963 is one historical instance. From Alabama, Wallace skillfully crafted a political career that made him a national figure when his 1968 presidential campaign carried five Deep Southern states and their 46 electoral votes. But today, none of that is on display for travelers moving down the highway.

Almost to our destination, we passed the turnoff to Fort Benning, one of several US military bases that were recently renamed under the Biden administration. The effort was aimed at removing the names of former Confederates from US military facilities, and this one on the Alabama-Georgia line had been named for Confederate General and ardent secessionist Henry L. Benning. Beliefs and narratives about those changes varied among military personnel and among civilians. Nevertheless, in 2023, Fort Benning was renamed Fort Moore after Lieutenant General Harold G. “Hal” Moore, Jr., a former Army Deputy Chief of Staff who passed away in 2017. Now, in 2025, the Trump administration has begun the process of changing the name back to Fort Benning, sort of — this time using the name to honor WWI veteran Fred Benning. About the change back to Benning, the Associated Press reported: “Federal law now prohibits naming military bases for Confederates. The Pentagon under President Donald Trump has found a workaround for reverting bases back to what they were formerly called, by finding new soldiers to honor with the same last name.”

With the military base in our rearview mirrors, we reached the Blessed Trinity Shrine Retreat mid-morning after losing an hour to the change in time zones.  The retreat, which sits on 1,200 acres in a particularly rural part of the Russell County, has a history that dates back to the 1910s, about the same time as the founding of then-Camp Benning. Though many Americans conceive of Alabama as being in the “Bible Belt,” a Catholic retreat on a huge tract of land is probably not a part of Average Joe’s beliefs, when he pictures such a thing. But that’s what’s here. On site, one can still find the founder Father Judge’s original house and shrine, as well as a modern facility nearby. We did our work there, helped to lift and move various things for the sisters, and by late afternoon were on our way. A separate bit of good news – for me, at least – lay in something I stumbled upon while there: the sisters were ready to get rid of their old farm truck, so I bought it! 

On our way home, we took Highway 169 instead of 280/431. After winding through small homesteads, the tiny community of Crawford was buzzing on a late Saturday afternoon. Two historic markers there explain that the place was originally named Crockettsville in honor of Davy Crockett, who served Andrew Jackson in the area in the 1830s. That was in the era of “Indian removal,” another myth from the bygone South. Prior to and during the Civil War, the town was purported by historical sources to be thriving. The Tuckabatchee Masonic Lodge was built there in 1848, and it still stands today Highway 80. After being restored as one of the state’s “Places in Peril,” the white, two-story structure became a community center.

Not far beyond Crawford, the East Alabama Motor Speedway was buzzing, too. It was race day! Traffic on the two-lane Highway 80 came to a standstill as state troopers helped cars and trucks ease into the grassy field where rows upon rows of them were parking. Music was blasting, and with the windows down, we could hear the hoots and hollers of the crowd. Small-track races are a Southern tradition that fit well into common narratives about the region. This speedway was built in 1973 by a man named Jimmy Thomas – for whom that Saturday race was named – and it got its NASCAR sanction in 1978. The speedway’s website declares proudly, “Today, the 3/8 mile high-banked clay oval is still viewed by many as one of the best dirt track facilities in the South.”

We got home late in the day, tired from the early departure and more than a little bit of manual labor. But I had a new-to-me old truck, and that meant my year of being car-less was over. Now, it’s springtime . . . and it just might be time to get out on the road again.

Editor’s Note (May 6, 2024): A few days after this post was published, a piece in Esquire from early April, about Smiths Station mayor Bubba Copeland, received a Pulitzer Prize. Though I was familiar with that recent situation, I chose not to include it in my comments about passing through the area. (Smiths Station is near Phenix City.) However, I want to recommend reading the Esquire piece as both a stark and a touching reminder of how beliefs, myths, and narratives affect Southern culture.