How many Jefferson Counties does this make now? Now it’s nine, tying it with Washington Counties!
Birmingham has a chonker of a courthouse, but I would expect no less from a city with its history. Unfortunately, that history is not one to be envied. There’s a reason why it once had the nickname “Bombingham.” I took a detour (a couple of them, actually) to visit some famous graves while I was there, specifically…
…Addie May Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. While many of you have never heard those names before, I have no doubt some of you of a certain age suspect who they were from context. For those of you who don’t know, on a September morning in 1963, KKK members planted and detonated a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church, resulting in the murder of four little girls whose only faults were being Black and unluckily in the wrong place at the wrong time. No doubt their families would rather they lived full lives in obscurity. No doubt things like this would have been why my grandparents would have been afraid for me visiting Bombingham, even in this day and age. The rest of the morning felt somber.
I had accomplished all my fun stuff beforehand. On my way into the county I took a detour to find an EarthCache. It was on a deserted mountain road with little traffic that, as per the CO, could be done from the car, which was fine with me; I was happy for a bulwark against the chilly winds. It also explained all the ups and downs of Ashville and Anniston. The EarthCache explained that I was going through the southernmost part of the Appalachian Mountains. I never think of the Appalachians extending this far so that was a bit of an eye opener for me. I answered some questions about synclines and anticlines and then continued on for the real prize of the day. I continued on to the nearby town of Trussville, parked at their Veterans’ Memorial, and took a short walk. I felt a little naked since I didn’t have my caching bag with me; the strap had broken the morning when I arrived in Cumming. Something like that is normally easy to replace, just not when you’re a thousand miles and three states away from home. It had warmed up enough that I didn’t need a jacket, but I still wore a scarf and took my trusty umbrella. I went down a path and, after climbing over a fallen log, found an ammo can in a tree stump.
Ladies and gentlemen (or however you identify—I don’t mean to be gender assumptive), I give you Trussville Civitan, the oldest cache in Alabama. Unfortunately, none of the trackables that were supposed to be there were so I left a couple I had brought with me from Texas.
I was glad to be done with Birmingham. While I’m sure it’s a nice city once you acclimate to it, I didn’t stay long enough to get the joyful parts of it, only some dark historical ones. I have no doubt that I’ll use it as a hub once I seriously start working Alabama, but for that day, I was ready to put it in my rear view, going toward the headier climes of…
Geocaching While Black 