Mobile
County Government
behind Fort Conde
Mobile is the third most populous city in the Southern US state of Alabama and is the county seat of Mobile County. It is located on the Mobile River and the central Gulf Coast of the United States. The population within the city limits was 198,915 during the 2000 census. It is the largest municipality on the Gulf Coast between New Orleans, Louisiana and St. Petersburg, Florida. Mobile is the principal municipality of the Mobile Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), a region of 411,721 residents which is composed solely of Mobile County and is the second largest MSA in the state. Mobile is included in the Mobile-Daphne–Fairhope Combined Statistical Area with a total population of 591,599 the second largest combined statistical area in the state behind Birmingham.
Mobile began as the first capital of colonial French Louisiana in 1702. The city
gained its name from the Native American Mobilian tribe that the French
colonists found in the area of Mobile Bay. During its first 100 years, Mobile
was a colony for France, then Britain, and lastly Spain. Mobile first became a
part of the United States of America in 1810, with the annexation of West
Florida under President James Madison. It then left that union in 1861 when
Alabama joined the Confederate States of America, which collapsed in 1865.
Located at the junction of the Mobile River and Mobile Bay on the northern Gulf
of Mexico, the city is the only seaport in Alabama. The Port of Mobile has
always played a key role in the economic health of the city beginning with the
city as a key trading center between the French and Native Americans down to its
current role as the 9th-largest port in the United States.
As one of the Gulf Coast's cultural centers, Mobile houses several art museums,
a symphony orchestra, a professional opera, a professional ballet company, and a
large concentration of historic architecture. Mobile is known for having the
oldest organized carnival celebrations in the United States, dating to the 18th
century of its early colonial period. It was also host to the first formally
organized Carnival mystic society or "krewe" in the United States, dating to
1830. People from Mobile are known as Mobilians.
The European settlement of Mobile, then known as Fort Louis de la Louisiane,
started in 1702, at Twenty-seven Mile Bluff on the Mobile River, as the first
capital of the French colony of Louisiana. It was founded by French Canadian
brothers Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de
Bienville, to establish control over France's Louisiana claims. Bienville was
made governor of French Louisiana in 1701. Mobile's Roman Catholic parish was
established on 20 July 1703, by Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrières de
Saint-Vallier, Bishop of Quebec. The parish was the first established on the
Gulf Coast of the United States. In 1704 the ship Pélican delivered 23 French
women to the colony, along with yellow fever which passengers had contracted at
a stop in Havana. Though most of the "Pélican girls" recovered, numerous
colonists and neighboring Native Americans died from the illness. This early
period was also the occasion of the arrival of the first African slaves,
transported aboard a French supply ship from Saint-Domingue. The population of
the colony fluctuated over the next few years, growing to 279 persons by 1708,
yet descending to 178 persons two years later due to disease.
These additional outbreaks of disease and a series of floods caused Bienville to
order the town relocated several miles downriver to its present location at the
confluence of the Mobile River and Mobile Bay in 1711. A new earth and palisade
Fort Louis was constructed at the new site during this time. By 1712, when
Antoine Crozat took over administration of the colony by royal appointment, the
colony boasted a population of 400 persons. The capital of Louisiana was moved
to Biloxi in 1720, leaving Mobile in the role of military and trading center. In
1723 the construction of a new brick fort with a stone foundation began and it
was renamed Fort Condé in honor of Louis Henri, Duc de Bourbon and prince of
Condé.
In 1763, the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the French and Indian War. The
treaty ceded Mobile and the surrounding territory to Great Britain, and it was
made a part of the expanded British West Florida colony. The British changed the
name of Fort Condé to Fort Charlotte, after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,
King George III's queen.
Conde-Charlotte House
More Photos of Conde-Charlotte House
The British were eager not to lose any useful inhabitants and promised religious tolerance to the French colonists, ultimately 112 French Mobilians remained in the colony. The first permanent Jewish presence in Mobile began in 1763 as a result of the new religious tolerance. Jews had not been allowed to officially reside in colonial French Louisiana due to the Code Noir, a decree passed by France's King Louis XIV in 1685 that forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism, and ordered all Jews out of France's colonies. Most of these colonial era Jews in Mobile were merchants and traders, and added to the commercial development of Mobile. In 1766 the population was estimated to be 860, though the town's borders were smaller than they had been during the French colonial efforts. During the American Revolutionary War, West Florida and Mobile became a refuge for loyalists fleeing the other colonies.
Richard's House
More Photos of Richard's House
While the British were dealing with their rebellious colonists along the
Atlantic coast, the Spanish entered the war as an ally of France in 1779. They
took the opportunity to order Bernardo de Galvez, Governor of Louisiana, on an
expedition east to retake Florida and captured Mobile during the Battle of Fort
Charlotte in 1780 as part of this campaign. They wished to eliminate any British
threat to their Louisiana colony, which they had received from France in the
1763 Treaty of Paris. Their actions were also condoned by the revolting American
colonies, as evidenced by the presence of Oliver Pollack, representative of the
American Continental Congress, and due to the fact that West Florida, for the
most part, remained loyal to the British Crown. The fort was renamed Fortaleza
Carlota, with the Spanish holding Mobile as a part of Spanish West Florida until
1813, when it was seized by the U.S. General James Wilkinson during the War of
1812.
Text from Wikipedia
Mobile Convention Center
Ben May Library
Ben May
book return
dome of former Mobile Nigh School
adjacent to Catholic Cathedral
street cafe
Gumbo
Wintzell's Oyster House
Oyster Po'boy lunch
grilled shrimp
Bankhead tunnel under the Alabama River
Mobile port
the USS Alabama
Mobile Music