Places to See in Alabama

A tale of two houses

Saturday I drove a little over an hour to visit two towns in Alabama that I had not been to before.  I started in Tuscumbia, the home of Helen Keller.  Tuscumbia is the perfect embodiment of a sleepy southern town, with a quiet downtown and charming old homes and church buildings.  It took a few minutes to find Ivy Greene, the birthplace of Keller.  I parked in front of a small white house. It had been built in 1820, and was 199 years old.  We toured the home with a knowledgeable guide.

 I had both read The Story of my Life and seen the movie The Miracle Worker, so seeing the actual room where the famous “food fight” or Manners lesson took place was interesting.  Helen had been allowed to do whatever she wanted for her entire 7 years of life, so when a teacher was hired to help her she didn’t want instruction.  She locked the teacher in her bedroom and hid the key on the day teacher was unpacking.  The “food fight” came about because Annie Sullivan, the teacher, would not allow Helen to walk around the table eating off of everyone else’s plates.  Annie felt like Helen could learn manners, and Helen did not want this.  Plates were broken, glasses spilled and food tossed all around the room before Helen ate with a fork and folded her napkin. 

Annie knew that it would be almost impossible to teach Helen with the family interfering and trying to help so she and Helen moved out of the main house and into a side cottage they turned into a school room.  From both the books and the movie I always thought the cottage was far from the home, but the two buildings were side by side.  The water pump where Helen first learned that w-a-t-e-r was that cold wet stuff pouring over her hand was right between the cottage and the home.  They were not really isolated at all, just separated.

This picture was taken from the porch of the cottage where Helen and Teacher moved 

I loved the beauty of the homes, and of the gardens and I thought about how Helen never really had the opportunity to see and enjoy what I could see.  But the flowers  were fragrant, and soft to the touch.  It was said that Helen loved a good garden.  She was an excellent and motivated student and she graduated from Radcliff College, traveled as an ambassador for the hearing and seeing impaired and wrote many books. She met every president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon Johnson.  I wonder if she would’ve had the same opportunities if she had not been blind and deaf.  She was highly intelligent but lived in a difficult time for women to achieve as much as she did.  I have always found her life interesting and inspiring.

The water pump where Helen first learned that things have words and that finger spelling was the key to knowing those words.

The next stop was downtown Florence Al.  I found an old but very popular diner for lunch.  I asked the waitress what they were famous for, and ended up with an excellent home made pimiento cheese sandwich.  I ordered a coke and it was served in a chilled glass bottle. 

Next I stopped at the Rosenbaum Home.  When we lived in West Virginia one of my travel regrets was not touring the Frank Lloyd Wright home in Pittsburg, Falling Water.  This is the iconic home built over a waterfall.  It turns out there is one Wright home in Alabama and it is open for tours.  The house is a simple design of his Usonian style.  Our guide explained that Usonian simply meant in the style of the United States of North America.  I had never heard of that before.  We were not allowed to take photos inside the home, and we were part of a very large group that found ourselves crammed into small rooms as we toured.  We entered the home in a dark small hallway, turned a corner and walked into a large living room with floor to ceiling window doors all along the backside of the house.  The view of the large yard and trees made the room feel much larger and airy.  When the home was built 80 years ago the view included the Tennessee River.  Now the trees are too tall.  The room had built in bookshelves that ran the entire length of the room.  The tour was fun and the house was one I would love to live in, but what really interested me was told to us as an after thought at the end of the tour. The Rosenbaums were active in the Civil Right’s movement, and they hosted many of the freedom riders that traveled down to Alabama to register voters.  The house was a safe place for people that were fighting for freedoms and rights for the African Americans in the area.

Click here to learn more about the  Frank Lloyd Wright home in Alabama.

I hope to learn more about the history of Alabama, and to explore more places here.