Visited April 9 - 10, and April 15, 2022
By Marty
This is a bonus post for a couple of side trips taken during our extended stay in Red Bay, Alabama. This should tide you over until our next post: Nashville!
As Janell told you in our Memphis post we were in Red Bay for an extended period of time (three weeks in total) to get some repairs done at the Tiffin repair facility and other work done by RV repair vendors in the area.
We took the opportunity to do the Tiffin factory tour and it was pretty darn remarkable to see, up close and personal, how they put these things together. Check out the video below if you are interested to see it. This factory churns out 13 motorhomes per day when at max production. At the time of our tour they were completing 10 per day because supply chain issues were holding them back. They actually have a six month backlog in delivering purchased motorhomes.
At the start of the tour we had a chance to meet Bob Tiffin. Bob started the company 50 years ago, and what a friendly man he is! Bob, and his company, are as customer centric as you will find.
We are thinking about trading the Beast in for....
Just kidding! Parked outside the Tiffin visitor center is this 1976 Allegro. Bob Tiffin started the company in 1972. This is a not so golden oldie!
We took an overnight trip to Birmingham, AL, about 2 hours southeast of Red Bay. This view is from Vulcan Park just north of downtown Birmingham.
Atop Vulcan Park sits a statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and forge. Why Vulcan? Keep reading! The statue, at 56' tall, is the largest statue ever cast in the US and the largest cast iron statue in the world.
Vulcan was commissioned by Birmingham leaders to represent their new growing city at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. After the fair he was brought home to Birmingham.
Birmingham, founded in 1871, was built on the iron & steel industry. The name was chosen in deference to the industrial heritage of Birmingham, England.
Seams of iron ore stretched for 25 miles through Red Mountain (on which sits Vulcan Park.) Also nearby were abundant deposits of coal, limestone, dolomite, and clay. With these raw materials at hand the iron industry flourished. By 1890 there were 28 iron furnaces in Birmingham.
Above is the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. The Sloss iron works was founded in 1881 and shut down in 1971. The complex was saved from the wrecking ball in the late 1970's and turned into a fascinating industrial museum and public event space.
Birmingham played a pivotal role in the American civil rights movement. On September 15, 1963 a bomb exploded under the steps of an exterior stairway of the 16th St. Baptist Church. On the other side of the wall four young girls, ages 11 - 14, were killed.
The Wales Window in the balcony of the 16th St. Baptist Church
From magiccityreligion.org (edited):
This stained glass window was created by John Petts of Wales, UK, with funds donated by Welsh children and ordinary citizens. When he heard of the tragedy, he was horrified as both a “father and a craftsman in a meticulous craft”. As such, he quickly offered his services to create a brand-new window and install it in the church to commemorate the girls. While the window was inspired by the damage to the church, it did not replace a damaged window. Those were restored. Instead it was installed as a third image of Jesus in the sanctuary.
Petts decided to depict the Christ figure in a manner that mirrored “a black protester taking part in a street demonstration in the South” as Pastor Christopher Hamlin explains:
“The man’s arms were flung above his head, and his body was gyrating as he was assaulted with fire hoses. The Jesus in the window Petts designed symbolized the crucified Christ and forms the upright beam of a cross, while a stylized stream of water from a fire hose forms the cross beam. He used a rainbow-colored nimbus on the Christ figure in the window to symbolize that God loves every person equally without respect to nationality, race or creed–for we are one in Christ Jesus”.
On our tour of the church the meaning of the position of Jesus’s hands was explained as follows: “the right one is pushing away hatred and injustice, the left offering forgiveness".
We took a three hour "The Fight for Rights Tour" with Mike of Red Clay Tours driving and walking us around key locations in the Birmingham civil rights movement.
We started in Kelly Ingram Park, kitty-corner to the 16th Street Baptist Chuck. This park (at the time known as West Park) was the assembly point in May, 1963 for marches to the Birmingham business district a few blocks away. The four sculptures below are in the park, evoking imagery of the Birmingham protest movement and the brutal tactics utilized to confront it.
Our tour stopped at the Bethel Baptist Church where Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was Pastor. Shuttlesworth was the local leader of the civil rights movement. On three separate occasions his church or home (located adjacent to the church at the time) were bombed.
There were over 40 racially motivated bombings in Birmingham between the late 40's and mid 60's, earning the city its notorious nickname: "Bombingham".
Our tour took us up Center Street, into the neighborhood known as "Dynamite Hill" where efforts were made to integrate the neighborhood, with multiple home bombings being the result.
On Friday, April 15th I dropped Janell at the Memphis airport to fly to Austin for a few days with five of my sisters for a celebration of sister Mary's looming 60th birthday. On my drive back to Red Bay I took an hour detour to visit the Shiloh National Military Park, all the while thinking that Janell will be sooo disappointed that she didn't get to visit the battlefield park with me... (can you say sarcasm?)
The Battle of Shiloh occurred on April 6 - 7, 1862, just a year after the Civil War began. On that day a Union army of 40,000 led by Generally Ulysses S. Grant battled a confederate army of 44,000 led by General Albert Sidney Johnston. Johnston was killed in the battle. There were almost 24,000 casualties in this battle (dead, wounded, missing), more than the total casualties of all previous wars in which our country had fought to that point.
A battlefield diorama in the visitor center
Day one of the battle ended with Grant's army pushed back nearly to the banks of the Tennessee River. On day two, with newly arrived reinforcements, Grant counter attacked, regaining all ground lost to the Confederate army the previous day. The Confederate army then retreated to Corinth, MS, 22 miles to the southeast.
The location of the battlefield headquarters for the various commanding officers are marked by these cannon ball pyramid monuments.
The Shiloh National Cemetery was created in 1866 to inter the remains of those killed in the battle of Shiloh and from all of the war operations along the Tennessee River. The cemetery holds 3,584 Civil War dead, with 2,359 of those unknown. In the Fall of 1866 workers disinterred the dead from 156 locations on the Shiloh battlefield, and 565 different locations along the Tennessee River. In case you were wondering the National cemeteries did not inter any Confederate soldiers.
Tall headstones mark the known dead; short stones denote the unknown soldiers.
The Gettysburg Address was delivered by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863.
Lincoln's speech of 271 words followed the two hour, 13,607 word long oration of the featured speaker that day, Edward Everett. Everett was the former dean of Harvard University and one of the most famous orators of his day.
Everett wrote Lincoln after the ceremony to say, "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."
