Exhibitions

MONTGOMERY DURING THE 19th CENTURY

February 3 through May 1, 2025
9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday

Montgomery During the 19th Century explores the people, commerce, and evolving transportation that shaped Montgomery during this era. The exhibit is part of a larger regional celebration commemorating the bicentennial of Marquis de Lafayette’s tour as “Guest of the Nation”. We are pleased to support this effort by using our collection and temporary loans from friends and partners to present a broader picture of what was happening in the capital city.

Through this and every exhibit, we aim to ignite interest in Montgomery’s history and encourage visitors to delve deeper by exploring local historical sites and attractions.

To explore and experience the exhibit in person, visit the Figh-Pickett House at 512 South Court Street, Monday through Thursday between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.. MCHS is closed on federal and state holidays. Parking is located at the rear of the house.

City of Montgomery, Harper's Weekly in 1861

Image credit: This engraving of Montgomery, Alabama, was created by an artist accompanying war correspondent Sir William Howard Russell.

MCHS thanks the following friends and partners for exhibit contributions and temporary loans: Mrs. Alisa Beck, Mr. Jeff Dutton, Dr. Elijah Gaddis, Mrs. Warren H. Goodwyn, Ms. Carole King, Landmarks Foundation, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Mr. Collier Neeley, Mrs. Marlow Reese, Jr., The First White House of the Confederacy, Ms. Tara Sartorius, Mr. & Mrs. Bill & Sieu Wood, art teacher Laura Bocquin and the Art Honor Society students from The Montgomery Academy.

EXHIBIT PROGRAMS & EVENTS

Van Depoele Electric Railway, Capital City Street Railway

Image Credit: Historic Montgomery photograph, Scott DeMotte & Perry, Inc

Exhibit Opening Reception
February 13th
5 – 6:30 p.m. (open to members and the public)

Brown Bag Lunch and Learn
March 12th
11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Guest Speaker: Collier Neeley, Executive Director, Landmarks Foundation

Marquis de Lafayette Celebratory Events

La Fayette (French Patriot)

Image credit: Historic Alabama postcard, La Fayette, French Patriot

The Landmarks Foundation, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Alabama Society DAR, and others will host a week-long series of educational events commemorating Lafayette’s contributions to uniting and reviving patriotism in America during his 1824-25 tour. Several key events are listed here. Please check the host organization’s website for more information.

Lafayette Exhibit Opening Reception

Old Alabama Town, Lucas Tavern
April 2nd
5:30-7:30 p.m.
https://touroldalabamatown.com/

Lafayette Proclamation, Panel Discussion with Historians, and Reception

Archives and History
April 3rd
Time to be Announced
https://www.archives.alabama.gov/

Living History Day

Old Alabama Town
April 4th
10 a.m. – 4 p.m
https://touroldalabamatown.com/

Bar-B-Que Celebration

Old Cahaba
April 5th
Time to be Announced
https://www.cahawba.com/

Crossroads

Dr. Elijah Gaddis, Hollifield Professor of Southern History, Auburn University

View of the Capitol 1857

Image credit: 1857 Ballou’s Pictorial, Vol. X111, No. 21.- Whole No. 335

Montgomery has always been a crossroads. Before the city we know, it was one of the hubs of Muscogee (Creek) trading, a place where roads and paths, rivers and streams, all connected. European Americans recognized this. They started moving in, establishing farms, plantations, and stores and their own trading routes. They brought enslaved Africans with them. These forced migrants helped clear the land, plant the fields, and build the city we know today. 

The crossroads of Montgomery were both literal and metaphorical. Roads, rivers, and eventually railroads did converge here. The confluence of waters and the central location in the state made it a logical place to establish stores, shipping depots, slave markets, and other central institutions of nineteenth-century life. But it was also a cultural crossroads where people from all over the world were thrust together. By statehood in 1819, Montgomery was officially a town made up of smaller settlements. It met the ambition of the new state to grow bigger and more prosperous. 

But early Montgomery was not just a place of growth and triumph. The early years of the city were the same ones when Muscogee people were forcibly removed from their land to make way for cotton plantations and white settlers. And those white settlers brought enslaved people by the thousands. Captives of African descent had little choice about where to settle or what work to do. This new city was a difficult, dangerous, and terrifying place, too. 

Nineteenth-century Montgomery can seem distant from us today. Many of us know and cherish the surviving buildings from this early period of our history. We occasionally stop and read the historic markers that dot downtown and commemorate people or events. These are all reminders of a period that helped form the city we know. 

Montgomery During the 19th Century, tries to bring attention to these messy, complex stories. Many places in Montgomery today tell pieces of the early Montgomery story. This exhibit doesn’t aim to tell every part of a story, which would require many thousands of pages and hundreds of images. Instead, we want to introduce you and then send you off to explore the other sites in Montgomery that can help you fill in more details. 

PERSPECTIVE IS EVERYTHING

Tara Cady Sartorius, Retired Curator of Education, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
Active Artist, Montgomery, Alabama

“The eye falls in every direction upon a dense, boundless forest, boundless as the sea, and producing the same solemn sensation of reverence for infinitude.” Frederick Law Olmstead, 1853, describing his view from the top of the Statehouse Capitol dome.

View of Montgomery, ca. 1870-1880

Artist unknown. Oil on canvas, 36 x 60 1/8 inches Gift of Landmarks Foundation of Montgomery, Inc. by transfer, 2007.18

Montgomery Skyline, 2013

Alisa Beck (b.1974), Oil on Panel, 11 x 14 inches Private Collection

Let’s consider two paintings with many elements in common, yet their differences (and the two together in harmony) tell an updated history of Montgomery. Trust that the predominant color in both pieces is a similar intense green, and see them in color at www.mchsal.org.

Alabama, once covered in ocean 80 million years ago, now owes its lush greens to climate and a vast network of rivers. The Alabama River meanders through Alabama’s South-Central terrain, and we can see evidence of its changing course on maps shared on Google Earth.

150 years ago, around the time View of Montgomery was painted, Montgomery was a mere 57 years old. By then the indigenous Creek cultures had been banished and broken, and the city was just recovering from the ravages of the Civil War while adjusting to an economy where slavery was illegal.

View of Montgomery records some specific and perhaps some remembered or imagined scenes. The signs of age in the painting itself suggest completion in the latter 19th century, although the specific position of the artist is unclear. Rescued from the attic of an old house in downtown Montgomery, some buildings are recognizable from the 1860s, 1870s, and early 1880s, and featured on the horizon is the 1851 newly rebuilt Capitol.

The unknown artist’s perspective was not just the built environment but the life of the town, collaged in diverse pursuits: kite flying, farming, transporting materials by foot and wagon, animal husbandry, and people of all social classes and races at work. The myriad details are set against the implied forest in the background that was slowly receding as mankind expanded homes in the wilderness.

Approximately 135 years later, most of that wilderness had disappeared, and Interstate 65 cut right through it. Driving the on-ramp going South from Prattville to Montgomery, local artist Alisa Beck (b.1974) regularly drove her red Honda FIT to work. Training as a landscape painter at the time, a flash of water caught her eye. She assumed it was the Alabama River, but it turned out to be a small lake: Crescent Lake. That glint of water reflected the sunrise every weekday morning and sparked Beck’s imagination. Through a series of iPhone photos, she composed Montgomery Skyline in her studio as a compelling pastoral scene with an urban twist.

What’s fun to consider is that both artists, apparent romantics, took liberties with their points of view. Beck’s distant skyline features a blurry but recognizable selection of Montgomery’s 20th-century business high-rises; “Unknown” has elevated the State Capitol almost into the clouds, while churches and homes are nestled in the mid-ground among trees. Beck’s manicured green space is 10 miles from Montgomery; “Unknown” is much closer to all the action celebrating small-town interactions. In contrast, Beck seems to be breathing the fresh air in solitude, away from the complications of a now-urban metropolis. What perspective will a yet-to-be-born local artist share another 135 years from now?

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts contributed valuable research and documentation about View of Montgomery.

Crescent Lake

Crescent Lake is the dark crescent shape on the left, home of the Crescent Lake Country Club

A WOMAN AND HER QUILT

Mrs. Ellen Frances Blue Jones

Ellen Frances Blue Jones

Crazy quilts, crafted from silks, velvets, and satins and embroidered with various decorative stitches, gained popularity in the 19th century. Ellen Blue Jones was the daughter of Neill Blue, an early settler of Montgomery, and the wife of T. L. Jones, whom she married in 1870. In a diary she kept during 1865, Ellen reflected on her health, family, religion, and, most notably, the closing days of the Civil War. She wrote regularly about her sewing projects, creating not only for herself but also for others, for which she received payment.

Mosaic quilt, Ellen Frances Blue Jones, ca. 1870

Silk and cotton, 92 x 92 inches. Landmarks Foundation of Montgomery, Cat. 123.

ECHOS OF THE PAST

The Bridal Gown of Miss Mattie Monroe

“At 8 o’clock, the choir commenced singing that grand and inspiring bridal march from the “Rose Maiden,” and as the strain “To the wedding morning beaming in the skies, bridal bells are ringing, bridal sons arise,” the bridal party entered up the three aisles of the church…

The softest white mull, with the skirt and bodice shirred, the yoke of filmy lace, with a bertha of similar lace as a finish. Over this fell the tulle veil, caught at the head with a spray of Lillie’s of the Valley. She carried Bride’s Roses.

Rev. Dr. L.S. Handley, the pastor of the church, performed the ceremony in an impressive manner, while the organ played a melody of love songs in gentle tones. The party left the church to the strains of Mendelssohn’s March.”

Mr. and Mrs. Clark left on the night train for a visit in Savannah and will afterward be at home in Florence, Alabama.”

Author Unknown
From the Clark Family records

Miss Mattie Monroe

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