About this Event
Join us for the Fall Pilgrimage! Additional information is available in the Fall Newsletter and online at alabamahistory.com/meetings.
Saturday tour sites include:
- Old Post Office, featuring WPA Mural
- Albert Patterson statue
- Russell County Courthouse, featuring Albert Patterson artifacts
- South Girard School, featuring materials from alumni
- Trinity Methodist Church
- New Central Baptist Church
- Franchise Baptist Church
The Old Post Office is home to one of 18 murals commissioned for Alabama post offices as part of the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression. The artist, John Kelly Fitzpatrick (1888-1953), painted the mural Cotton in 1938. Fitzpatrick, a Wetumpka native, was a well-established artist in Alabama by the 1930s and helped found the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Dixie Art Colony. His only other Post Office mural was painted in Ozark, Alabama, and titled Early Industry in Dale County.
New Central Missionary Baptist Church was founded when a group of members from Shiloh Baptist Church decided to branch out and start their own congregation. Rev. Ruben Lanier, the first pastor, donated the land and the foundation was laid for Central Baptist Church. The original location of the church was on 26th Street in Phenix City, across from the cemetery where enslaved persons were buried. When the original church building burned in 1924, members met at the Masonic Hall until New Central Missionary Baptist Church was erected. Rev. Jeffrey L. Dancy, Sr. currently serves as pastor.
Franchise Missionary Baptist Church’s history dates to 1852, when a few black citizens met under a brush harbor on the banks of the Chattahoochee River and made a joyful noise through praise and worship. Because their manner of praise and worship was a bit too loud for some of the neighboring people, this group of believers were moved to Girard Baptist Church. When they were considered too loud for that sanctuary, they constructed a wood-frame building in 1882, and the congregation adopted the name Franchise Baptist Church. After an eventual move to a brick structure, and following numerous renovations, Franchise expanded to the current building in 1999. The congregation has been under the effective and dynamic pastoral guidance of Dr. Raymond Cochran, Sr., for 56 years!
The Russell County Justice Building was designed by Columbus, Georgia architect James Joseph Walton Biggers Sr. and built in 1938. Thanks to museum specialists from the Alabama Department of Archives and History, we will have a chance to view an exhibit curated for the Fall Pilgrimage related to the assassination of Albert Patterson, which occurred on June 18, 1954, just a block from the courthouse. The exhibit will feature the hat and boots that Patterson was wearing at the time of the M**der, as well as documents from the Russell Betterment Association.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1400 Whitewater Ave, 1400 Whitewater Avenue, Phenix City, United States
USD 44.52