Induction Year: 1974

Mildred Westervelt Warner

  • September 9th, 2021

Mildred Westervelt Warner, the only woman president of a major integrated paper company, led Gulf States Paper Corporation for over 20 years.

She began her career with EZ Opener Bag Company of Illinois and moved to Alabama in 1928 when Gulf States Paper Corporation (EZ’s successor company) was incorporated. She became executive vice-president at that time. In 1938, she became president and served in that position until 1957.

Her sensational career in the paper industry is well known to industrialists throughout the nation. She was, indeed, a pioneer. Long before the rise of women to executive positions became a public issue, she proved that the roles of homemaker and mother, community worker, and industrial executive are compatible.

Mrs. Warner achieved much as an executive leader. She created a professional forestry organization to handle the forestry affairs of Gulf States. In 1948, she guided the development of a program in which company foresters advised private Alabama landowners in developing sound forestry conservation practices. In 1953, she established the Westervelt Game Preserve, and in 1956, she was instrumental in employing the first corporate specialist in forest game management in the South. This specialist advised in the development of an overall game management program, which is now widely copied.

In 1948, Mrs. Warner directed the expansion of the Tuscaloosa plant, almost doubling plant capacity. She saw the need to expand the company’s limited product line. In the early 1950’s she developed the mill at Demopolis, which marked the first installation in the paper industry of a continuous digester for making highly bleached market pulp.

After her retirement as president in 1957, she served Gulf States for two years as Chairman of the Board. In her retirement, Mrs. Warner devoted her energies to philanthropy. Churches, educational institutions, libraries, orphanages, YMCAs, and scouting were among those who benefited from her generosity.

The University of Alabama awarded Mildred Westervelt Warner an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1956. She was awarded the First Citizenship Award of the Tuscaloosa Civitan Club and the Woman of Achievement Award of the Tuscaloosa Business and Professional Women’s Club. Mildred Westervelt Warner received many honors during her lifetime. Her memories are a statewide program of forest conservation and a thriving company providing thousands of jobs.

Biographical information provided by Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame.

Frank Park Samford Sr.

  • September 9th, 2021

Builder of Liberty National Life Insurance Company (now Torchmark Corporation), Alabama’s largest life insurance company, promoter of higher education, and outstanding business leader, Frank Park Samford, Sr. was an exemplary citizen.

He was born in Troy, Alabama November 1, 1893, to Kate Park Samford and William Hodges Samford. His father was a judge on the Alabama Court of Appeals and his grandfather was governor of Alabama. Frank Samford received his AB degree from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn University) and was later to receive honorary doctoral degrees from Auburn University, The University of Alabama, and Samford University.

In 1919 he was married to Hattie Mae Noland, who shared in his higher education interests. They had two children, Frank Park Samford, Jr. and Ann (Mrs. Samuel E. Upchurch).

Frank Samford served 27 years on the Board of Trustees of Auburn University and 34 years as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Howard College later to be named Samford University. He is credited with his participation in efforts to move the campus from the East Lake neighborhood in Birmingham to its current campus in Homewood, Alabama. The University was named for him in 1965. He also served as a Trustee of Southern Research Institute. Practically every educational and charitable organization in Alabama has benefitted from his generosity. Mr. Samford was selected in 1958 as Man of the South by Dixie Business Magazine and appointed Citizen of the Year in 1965 by the Alabama Broadcasting Association. He was also named Citizen of the Century for Birmingham by the Chamber of Commerce. He served on the Boards of Southern Research Institute, Community Chest, Alabama Heart Association, and Associated Industries. In addition to numerous business, civic, educational, cultural, financial, and charitable organizations, he also served as a deacon and benefactor of Southside Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Frank Park Samford, Sr. was inducted into the Alabama Men’s Hall of Fame in 1989.

Biographical information provided by Samford University.

Benjamin Russell

  • September 9th, 2021

Benjamin Russell was the origin of all things Russell, in Alabama today.

Born on a small farm in rural Tallapoosa County Alabama, exactly 100 years after 1776, Ben Russell’s genealogy traces back to Richard Russell of Westchester County, England, in the 14th century. Beginning in 1603 the lineage traces on through the church records of Ipswich County and London and finally, around 1750, James Russell crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Charleston, South Carolina. His son John Russell fought in the War of Independence. The family slowly migrated through Georgia and into Alabama.

B.F.C. and Bettie’s son, Benjamin, was “a dedicated and hardworking young man” and eventually worked his way through the University of Virginia, graduating in the spring of 1899 with a law degree.

Following his marriage in November 1899 to Roberta Bacon McDonald, Benjamin Russell practiced law in Birmingham for a few months. When his father, B.F.C., suffered a paralyzing stroke in early 1900, Benjamin returned to Alexander City to manage the family business. In the same year, at the age of 24, he founded the Citizens Bank of Alexander City, which in 1904 became the First National Bank, then Aliant Bank, the predecessor to the present-day Valley Bank System.

In April of 1902, Ben Russell founded Russell Mills in a 50 x 100-foot wooden building with six knitting machines and ten sewing machines. The new company purchased yarn for the knitting machines, which made the cloth for the cut and sew operation. The company’s first garment was a ladies and children’s knitted shirt, produced at the rate of 150 a day. Tragically, on Friday, June 13, 1902, the entire business district of Alexander City, including Citizen’s Bank, burned.

Mr. Ben did not confine his efforts to rebuilding his bank. The pioneering spirit of his lineage allowed him to quickly shake off the effects of “the great fire” and take a bold, new leap.

Young Ben Russell was quite adept at most practical applications of his ingenuity, but in those early days, success in such a fledgling business was difficult. It soon became apparent that each garment cost several cents more than it could be sold for. He met with his employees and in a heart-to-heart talk, the matter of quantity and quality of production was discussed. Following a grim “we succeed, or we fail together” declaration, they came away with an even stronger resolve. Hard work and innovation were Ben Russell’s greatest assets and these as well as a thousand other problems were ultimately solved.

In 1908, the ladies and children’s shirts went out of style and Russell changed its product line to ladies’ step-ins or teddies. Thus, the first change in what would become a constant flow of designs and garments to meet customer demands, from underwear to dress, casual, active, and athletic wear, under the Russell Athletic brand.

In the spring of 1902, “Mr. Ben,” as he was called by all, built a telephone line from Dadeville through Alexander City and on to Sylacauga, establishing the first telephone service in Alexander City. The first exchange placed twenty telephones in service through a switchboard located in the basement of the First National Bank. This business venture later was sold to Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph on February 24, 1904, for $15,250 – a significant sum in its day.

In 1911 the banker and cotton miller needed electrical power for his little mill and he began construction of a dam at Buzzards’ Roost Shoals on the Tallapoosa River, about five miles northeast of downtown Alexander City.

Alabama Power had, however, begun preparation for the massive Martin Dam project farther downstream. This impoundment would flood Mr. Ben’s site.

The old tales paint a picture of a sophisticated gentleman, briefcase in hand, calling on Mr. Ben at the construction site of his dam.

The story goes that Mr. Martin introduced himself as an attorney representing investors who had acquired the riparian rights (only) to the entire river valley.  The obvious message would have been that the small, new facility would soon be below the level of the huge, new Lake Martin, to come.

Knowing the gentlemanly nature of the two – actual facts were most likely replaced at this point by pure humor.  Allegedly, Mr. Ben informed Mr. Martin that he too was an attorney and that it would appear that they were standing on Mr. Ben’s property while discussing Mr. Martin’s visions!

We must hasten, at this point, to say that this version could not have been technically correct, for the two men became lifelong friends and worked tirelessly, together to bring us to the incredibly fortuitous point that we enjoy today.

According to Thomas W. Martin, Chairman of the Board of Alabama Power Company, Mr. Russell was the “moving spirit” behind his new Industries Light Power Company. After much negotiation, Mr. Russell sold this power project to the Interstate Power Company, which became Alabama Power Company in 1920.

In the words of Martin, “the broadminded Russell recognized the greater public benefit of the complete development of the power of the stream.  A satisfactory agreement was therefore reached with Russell for purchase of his Industries Light and Power Company and for supplying his enterprises with power through a very favorable power franchise.” Most importantly, however, Mr. Ben promoted a personal friendship and an agreement with Martin that would lead to the purchase of a significant portion of the 880 miles of shoreline property of the new lake.

Ben, like his forefathers, remained “close to the land” and he continued to develop the family farm – the pioneering spirit seems to have continued to evolve. He ultimately combined some of the land acquired from the Alabama Power Company with the family farm – in the 1930s this comprised 30,000 acres of farm and timberland on the shores of Lake Martin.

Following the founding of Russell Mills/Russell Corporation in 1902, Mr. Ben was quick to build a church for the people that were moving into the new Russell mill village. The church was a typical white structure with wood columns, offering Methodist and Baptist services on alternating Sundays – the two preachers and one congregation system seemed to work just fine, over the years.

Mr. Ben realized the need to provide education for his employees and their families and in the fall of 1917, he brought into the organization Professor R.Y. Scott to establish the Russell Mills School and hold classes in the Russell Mills church building. By 1924 the school had outgrown the church facility and a new school building was built. In 1927 the Russell School became a part of the Alexander City School System offering grades kindergarten through ninth.

The mill village grew to 350 or so houses but beginning in the late 1950s residents were encouraged to purchase property in Springhill Subdivision that had been made available and build their own home. By mid-1960 the “old mill village” had been replaced by the ever-expanding “cotton mill.”

In addition to all the mill and bank-related interests, Mr. Ben began buying or creating other businesses. In 1916 he opened the Alex City Wholesale Grocery business in the area of the present-day fire department and the former Outlook newspaper office location. Mr. Ben became owner and operator and Mr. I.C. Kelley was appointed manager. This grew into a very successful operation and by 1941 consisted of two plants with twelve buildings and over one hundred employees.

In 1920 Mr. Ben purchased the Nolen Hotel, formerly the Alabama Hotel, from Leon Nolen and changed the name to the Russco Hotel. The name was later changed to the Russell Hotel. The Hotel was located on prime property across from the railroad station in Alexander City and the dining room became the in-place in Alexander City.

In 1923 Mr. Ben built a hospital for the rapidly growing community. Russell Hospital, which was located on Lee Street, began operation with thirty-five beds and provided equipment for surgery and general inpatient care. Throughout its 41 years at the Lee Street location, many additions were made to the hospital as the town and mills continued to grow. In 1964 the Russell Hospital built a modern facility on Highway 280. Today the continually expanding Russell Medical Center is a progressive medical complex, serving several communities.

In 1923 Ben Russell completed a dam across Elkahatchee Creek, located three and one-half miles south of downtown Alexander City. He built a pumping station, pipeline, filter plant, and waterworks system that would supply the entire town until 1947, and the Russell Mills and Russell mill village until the early 1980s. For many years thereafter stories of the difficulties of digging the three-mile-long pipeline ditch by hand were legendary.

The early 1920s were outstanding years for Florida land and real estate speculation. Mr. Ben, the opportunist, purchased a hotel in Coral Gables, Florida. This would have been a very rewarding venture had it not been for the stock market crash of 1929. Florida’s real estate boom did not begin again until well after World War II.

In 1918, the young Russell purchased the Alexander City Manufacturing Company, a “millwork” or woodworking industry, with a likely predetermined objective. Prior to the completion of the “New Electric Dam,” as it was called locally, much of the 41,150-acre footprint of Lake Martin had to be cleared of “old-growth timber,” huge three to five-hundred-year-old longleaf pines as well as the tremendous hardwoods.

Seeing the potential of this operation, Mr. Russell and J.M. Steverson purchased a standard gauge rail locomotive, laid the railroad lines, and began operating the Pine Lumber Company railroad in 1916. The tracks terminated in Alexander City at the sawmill and lumberyard of Mr. Ben’s newly acquired woodworking industry.

Mr. Russell’s farming interest came from his family background, but the extreme degree of this interest has never been explained and was one of the few areas of his business ventures that could have been deemed to be not entirely logical. Land and timber alone were not challenging enough for Ben Russell, so in 1926 he formally created Dixie Farms. This was during the time Martin Dam was being constructed. This family farming business was actually managed by Mr. Ben and his brother, Thomas C. Russell, from their offices in the First National Bank in Alexander City. Thomas C. became Mayor of Alexander City in 1907 and served until 1947.

Ben Russell, always the entrepreneur, was intent on promoting farming and other productive lifestyles for the people of this most rural area of East Central Alabama. He called on his bank to cooperate in setting up a number of innovative, financial vehicles to help the cash-poor farming families set up their own ventures. The land was made available, mules were purchased, seed and fertilizer provided, and supervision offered, along with cooperative purchasing and marketing arrangements.

There were many categories of this cooperative-type venture – “one-horse (or one-mule) farms” and “two-horse farms.” Usually, one family of 3-4 would be allocated one “horse.” Cotton was the primary crop, early on. A bale of cotton would then sell for $25 and a one-horse farm could produce 4-5 bales a season.

Mr. Ben’s new farming venture, like the bank and the textile mill, was quite successful in those years and for an extended period, approximately 100 families made their livelihood on the Russell farmlands surrounding the small settlement of Dixie. The primary crops were cotton, corn, and peanuts. Later, cattle were also raised on this land. This “close to the land” thinking surely saved many a family from destitution during the harsh years of the Great Depression in the Deep South.

With the help of George Washington Carver, better farming techniques and the use of advanced, hybrid seed stock were promoted on Dixie Farms. In 1928 a successful experiment was undertaken. Ben Russell set aside 3,000 acres to provide for the production of long-staple cotton in east Alabama. These endeavors required much vision and commitment. A cotton gin, for example, had to be built at Dixie Farms.

The first farm superintendent, or overseer, of Dixie Farms, was Mr. Arthur Worthy for whom the farm church, Worthy’s Chapel, and the school were named. The church is now the Russell Farm Baptist Church. Dr. McElroy Dean, a local veterinarian, became farm superintendent of “Dixie” and remained until 1937 when Mr. Russell Ballard was appointed. Mr. Ballard, who had served as assistant superintendent when he joined Dixie Farms on November 20, 1933, became superintendent in 1937 and served in that capacity until his retirement from Russell Lands in December 1974. Mr. Ballard’s assistant, Rudolph Evans, served as head forester for Russell Lands until 1982.

“Dixie” was the central location of the old Dixie Farms, which later became the Russell Farms operation. Previously the site was home to the old Benson Dixie Industrial Company. Dixie, now Russell Crossroads, was located on the present Highway 63 just north of Windermere Road. The fields, barns, and farmhouses are gone now, along with the sawmill, turpentine mill, cotton gin, charcoal plant, blacksmith’s shop, log pond, railroad, dairy, and superintendent’s house.

During the early days of Dixie Farms, Lake Martin began to fill and Mr. Russell spent time and resources on controlling the erosion problem. It was then predicted that within 50 years the entire lake would fill with the silt washing in from the surrounding farm fields.

During these years, most small rural farms in the southeast were being abandoned to erosion and the general population shift. Even Dixie suffered the same fate as time and morays took their toll. Today it is hard to imagine that farmers, then, had no clue that their life-giving topsoil would soon be totally depleted. Mr. Ben’s solution was the promotion of an all-out war on erosion. His efforts were immense; the resulting terrace and drainage patterns covered virtually every acre of land and are still quite visible in the dense forest of today. The scope of this undertaking is evident now, however, only with the realization that the individual farmer completed these features by his own hand, with the aid of the loyal old horses and mules. Sad to relate, most of the effort was just in time for the latter days of the small farms of the South.

Fortunately, Mr. Ben’s obsession with the land provided a young forest that would in time cover the land and promote the slow process of healing the scars of “progress.” His tree planting enterprise was, however, considered to be “fool-hearted,” in those days as, “The Alabama Power Company had just cleared and sold, burned, tied down or given away timber covering much of the 44,000 acres of land covered by Lake Martin.” Fortunately, Mr. Ben had a broader goal in mind and the old rock-strewn, red clay moonscapes of that abandoned way of life have generally recovered.

Farming was a great love of Mr. Ben but today few people realize that he was looking “a mile down the road” by acquiring all of his land, based on its relationship to Lake Martin. Company property maps and records clearly show that lake frontage, not farmland, was his ultimate goal while others complained about Lake Martin and worried about malaria. Mr. Ben could scarcely believe his good fortune – “to have a gigantic lake dropped on top of us.”

Mr. Ben believed that recreation was the wave of the future and that Lake Martin was our key to this future. He had been a charter member and officer of the Alexander City Development and Industrial Club upon its organization on April 29, 1901. He was instrumental in organizing the Commercial Club of Alexander City in 1910, which in 1920 was reorganized as the Chamber of Commerce of Alexander City, where he served as the local organization’s president from 1910 to 1937. He was the driving in establishing the Alabama State Chamber of Commerce, and became its first president, serving for three years – from June 11, 1937, until the summer of the year before his death.

Mr. Ben was one of the pioneers of good roads in Alabama. He organized and was elected President of the Florida Short Route in 1920. This group was devoted entirely to the promotion of tourist travel. He was responsible for bringing the “Florida Short Route” through Alexander City and served as president of the organization until his death. He also opened the first subdivision on Lake Martin, the Lake Hills Subdivision, on March 27, 1928. The Boulder Club, also built in 1928, had a “proper” dining facility and a huge ballroom. The Boulder Club was considered the place for social activity in Alexander City.

In 1940, Mr. Ben was among several industry leaders, principally his friend Tom Martin, who organized the Alabama Research Institute for the purpose of promoting scientific research in the use of local raw materials in the manufacture of finished products. Later the name was changed to Southern Research Institute when the organization’s geographic area of interest broadened, and it began attracting people from throughout the South. It grew to have research facilities in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Frederick, Maryland. In 1999 Southern Research Institute merged into a University of Alabama at Birmingham research program.

Mr. Ben had been ahead of his own time and with the coming of the second half of the century, long after his death, the greatest asset of Mr. Ben’s “closeness to the land” began to come to fruition – the appeal of the shoreline property to a slightly more affluent population. This “affluence” might have only been the ability of a textile worker to spend two or three hundred dollars to tear down an old mill village or tenant farmhouse and rebuild it in the form of a fishing cottage on lakefront property provided by the company. This affluence was also exemplified in the form of a banker from Birmingham paying $25/mo. for a “cabin” reconstructed by the farm crews. Thus, went the old tenant farmhouses and many of the 350 or so Russell mill village houses that were torn down during the late 1950s. Of far greater importance, however, this phenomenon signaled an era of solid proof that “The Old Man” could, in fact, “talk to you while looking over your shoulder, 100 years into the future.”

A typical example of Mr. Ben’s enthusiastic management style was told by Carl A. Swanson, who was traveling by train from Chicago to Florida when he happened to sit by Mr. Ben Russell somewhere north of Alexander City. By the time Mr. Ben reached home, he had persuaded Mr. Swanson, a highly educated and skilled electrical engineer, to spend the night and tour his mills the next day. Missing his train to Florida the next day, Mr. Swanson called his employer and turned down his promotion and a new position in Florida.

This and innumerous other examples of the man’s dynamic style prove that, in part, his success was due to the realization that even he could not make all of the decisions. He knew that he needed help in managing his varied enterprises.

During his lifetime Mr. Russell, the young man from a farm in one of the poorest and most rural areas of the South, had created a bank, a textile mill, a development potential of hundreds of miles of prime shoreline, an entire farming community, a mill village, church, school, hospital, a phone company, a municipal water supply, a foundry, a woodworking industry, a hotel, a dairy, a bakery, a soft drink bottling company, a laundry, a wholesale grocery and founded the State Chamber of Commerce.

The passing of “Mr. Ben” on December 16, 1941, brought great uncertainty to the rural community and many pondered the future of his vast and varied enterprises. Changing times and lifestyles soon caught up with the farming venture but the land remained. The farming interest had given purpose to the land for years, but its real value soon emerged.

Upon Mr. Ben’s death, the Benjamin and Roberta Russell Educational and Charitable Foundation was created from his estate to continue his philanthropic works. Each year millions of dollars are given in his memory through scholarships, endowments, and grants to various educational and charitable causes.

He was further memorialized by the dedication and naming of the Benjamin Russell High School on September 4, 1950. His son Robert enabled the city to enjoy tremendous savings by personally supervising the building of the new high school.

Biographical information provided by Russell Lands History.

Edward Aubert Roberts

  • September 9th, 2021

Edward Aubert Roberts, a quiet force that shaped the city of Mobile, served not only Alabama, but the nation, with a modest spirit, never seeking recognition or reward.

Ed Roberts was the first employee of Waterman Steamship Corporation in Mobile, which was formed to cultivate opportunities for steamship navigation after World War I. Roberts, a Mobile native, attended University Military School and Auburn Polytechnic Institute, prior to becoming Waterman’s chief assistant. On the $125 a month salary of a cargo clerk, Roberts began his career, and his efficiency won him steady promotions that led to becoming president of the company in 1936. During World War II, Roberts headed the largest privately owned steamship line in the nation, operating a fleet of 125 ships. Roberts personally served as an advisor to the director-general of the War Shipping Administration, a position for which he was awarded a Certificate of Merit from President Harry S. Truman. After the war, Roberts served without pay to develop a multi-million-dollar post-war expansion program. In recognition of his services, the Mobile Civitan Club named him the first recipient of its Man-of-the-Year Award in 1948. Roberts also served as a member of the Business Advisory Council of the U.S. Department of Commerce. He also founded another business empire, Southern Industries, which under Roberts’ leadership grew from $1.9 million in total assets in 1946 to more than $28 million in 1964.

Thomas Wesley Martin

  • September 9th, 2021

Thomas Wesley Martin (1881-1964) was perhaps Alabama’s premier businessman of the twentieth century.

An attorney, utilities executive, economic recruiter, research promoter, and booster for Alabama, he began his long career in Alabama as an assistant in the attorney general’s office in 1903. He was the general counsel, president, and chairman of the board of the Alabama Power Company, an association that began in 1911 and ended with his death in 1964.

Thomas Wesley Martin was born in Scottsboro, Jackson County, on August 13, 1881. His parents, William Logan Martin and Margaret Ledbetter Martin were from pioneer Madison County families. His father was educated at Cumberland Law School, and the family moved to Montgomery in 1889 after Gov. Thomas Seay appointed Logan Martin attorney general to fill a vacancy. Young Martin studied law at the University of Alabama and was admitted to the Alabama bar on December 5, 1901. He then worked in his father’s law practice, where he had as his mentor longtime legislative clerk and Alabama attorney general Massey Wilson, who introduced Martin to the legal issues of dam construction on rivers in Alabama. Together, the attorneys worked on several cases that paved the way for the development of hydroelectricity in the nation.

One of Martin’s most important goals was to improve the economy of Alabama and to increase jobs in the state. He was, of course, in the business of selling electricity and was actively engaged in convincing new industries to locate plants in Alabama to use that electricity. He also was committed to extending electricity into rural areas and directed the most extensive rural electrification program in the South 15 years before the federal government established the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935. Martin supported research grants to determine how electricity could improve the farmers’ quality of life and the profitability of farms and was responsible for the founding of the Southern Research Institute and the state Chamber of Commerce. He was successful in convincing the U.S. Congress to create the Horseshoe Bend National Military Park to commemorate the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

In 1911, Martin was retained by James Mitchell, a Massachusetts engineer who was planning to build a large dam on the Coosa River. The following year, Mitchell bought out Alabama Power owner William Patrick Lay, who owned the rights to the dam site. Mitchell began construction on the dam, which he would name for Lay, and completed it in 1913. The dam was made operational in 1914, the first step in building an electrical system—generation, transmission, and distribution—in Alabama. In June 1919, Martin married Mary Evelyn Tyson of Montgomery; the couple would have no children.

Mitchell eventually folded his various companies into the Alabama Power Company, and Martin served as general counsel to that company from 1912 until Mitchell’s death in 1920. Martin succeeded Mitchell as company president and began a rural electrification program that same year. He also created a hydrology laboratory at Alabama Power, one of the first in the nation, to assist with dam design. Alabama Power’s second dam, Mitchell Dam, was completed on the Coosa River in 1921. Also in 1921, Martin established an economic development program to recruit new industry to Alabama. And in 1924, he directed Alabama Power to fund research by the Alabama Polytechnic University (now Auburn University) to determine how electricity could increase farm profitability.

Over the next decade, the company would construct four more dams, one more on the Coosa and three on the Tallapoosa River. These facilities provided inexpensive hydroelectricity for the state’s economic development and for the new electrical appliances rapidly appearing in the 1920s. Beginning in 1921, Martin led the drive for interstate electrical connections between Alabama and Georgia, and in the mid-1920s, he was able to form Southeastern Power & Light as a holding company for Alabama Power. Martin organized utilities in four states—Mississippi Power, Georgia Power, South Carolina Power, and Gulf Power companies—and folded them into his holding company. He sent men he trained in Alabama to operate these companies and to develop the electrical systems in neighboring states. In 1929, control of Southeastern Power & Light was acquired by Wall Street investors who merged it with Midwestern utilities and the Tennessee Electric Power Company to form a $1 billion holding company, Commonwealth & Southern (C&S). Martin became the first president of C&S but retained his presidency of Alabama Power, to which he returned full time in 1932.

With the coming of World War II, Martin worked to acquire defense industries and military bases for Alabama, such as the Hollingsworth & Whitney plant located in Mobile and the Childersburg-based plants that produced explosives. After the war, he chaired the state committee that led efforts to convert abandoned facilities to peacetime industries. Convinced that the South lagged behind the North in research, he persuaded other state industrial leaders to join him in founding and funding the Southern Research Institute (now Southern Research) in Birmingham, which was created to make the southern industry more competitive. The facility became active after 1944.

In the 1940s, after the federal Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that Commonwealth & Southern had to be broken up under the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Martin took a leadership role in creating the Southern Company, which became the holding company for Alabama Power, Mississippi Power, Gulf Power, and Georgia Power by 1949. Martin was adamant that it be a true southern company with a southern board of directors, southern attorneys, and a southern services company headquartered in the South that would provide the engineering services for the operating companies.

In the late 1950s, Martin initiated a second dam construction program that provided electricity for the state’s post-World War II boom. In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin led Alabama Power Company’s construction of dams and generating plants on the upper Coosa River and on the Warrior River. Martin also helped organize the state chamber of commerce to coordinate and promote economic development.

Martin was a lifelong student of U.S. and Alabama history, often researching and writing about topics he was interested in, giving talks, and publishing essays. He wrote French Military Adventures in Alabama (1939) and revised it twice with new information, Doctor William Crawford Gorgas of Alabama and the Panama Canal (1947), Candles in the Canebrake: An Historical Sketch of the Time and Setting (1955), and The Story of Horseshoe Bend National Military Park (1959). In 1913, Martin had urged James Mitchell not to build a dam that would flood the land at the Horseshoe Bend of the Tallapoosa River. In the 1950s, Martin actively pressured the U.S. Congress to create the military park commemorating the U.S. victory, led by Martin’s hero Gen. Andrew Jackson, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. He worked with the Alabama Department of Archives and History on many projects and acquired and donated French wallpaper commemorating the Vine and Olive Colony, a nineteenth-century community of French settlers near present-day Demopolis in Marengo County.

For more than four decades, Martin was recognized as a national leader in the electric industry, honored by the Edison Electric Institute, Forbes Magazine, and others. But he never forgot his roots in the mountains of northern Alabama. The driving force of Martin’s life was his love for Alabama and its people and his determination that, as he often said, “the second half of the twentieth century belongs to the South.” He died of a heart attack in Birmingham on December 8, 1964, at age 83. He was buried in the Martin family plot at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery.

Biographical information provided by the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Braxton Bragg Comer

  • September 9th, 2021

Historians have claimed that the Progressive era in Alabama politics began with the governorship of Braxton Bragg Comer (1848-1927).

Scion of a well-to-do family, this successful industrialist and planter spent four stormy years as Alabama’s governor that were marked by progress in education, railroad regulation, tax funding, and conservation. This same person, however, used strong-arm tactics toward labor and demonstrated a lack of genuine concern for children in the labor force. Comer’s brand of progressivism, which sought to serve the new industrial-urban interests while not disturbing the traditions of the old plantation system, brought numerous collisions with powerful interests.

Braxton Bragg Comer was born at Spring Hill, in Barbour County, on November 7, 1848, to John Fletcher Comer and Catherine Drewry Comer, who moved from Virginia to Georgia before finally settling in the southeastern section of Alabama’s Black Belt in the 1840s. John Fletcher Comer was a county judge in Georgia and in Alabama owned a cotton plantation and a lumber mill. He gave his son a good private education, and in 1864 young B. B. Comer entered the University of Alabama, where he remained until forces under the command of U.S. general James H. Wilson burned the school buildings in 1865 during the Civil War. He subsequently attended the University of Georgia and finally received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from Virginia’s Emory and Henry College in 1869. Three years later, he married Eva Jane Harris of Cuthbert, Georgia, with whom he would have eight children. The Comers were members of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Under Comer’s management, the family plantation at Comer Station in Barbour County prospered and grew to more than 30,000 acres.

Like many postwar planters, Comer branched out into merchandising. In 1885, he used the money he made as a merchant-planter in Barbour County to become a partner in a wholesale grocery business in Anniston, in Calhoun County. He sold his interest in the firm in 1890 and moved to Birmingham, where he became president of the City National Bank and bought cornmeal, flour, and textile mills. Comer achieved his greatest business success in the development of Avondale Mills, a textile venture that grew into one of Alabama’s largest industrial enterprises.

While in Anniston, Comer learned that his Atlanta competitors could undersell his and other Alabama businesses because of Georgia’s lower freight rates. By the time he had built Avondale Mills, Comer was the state’s most vocal advocate of controlling Alabama’s railroad rate structure. The Birmingham Commercial Club, which Comer helped to organize in 1893, and the Birmingham Freight Bureau, also led by Comer, both investigated freight rate discrimination and recommended that rates be controlled by expanding the powers of the state railroad commission. Comer’s organized efforts failed to persuade legislators of the need for reform during the 1890s, but he and his allies renewed their efforts at the Constitutional Convention of 1901, where they campaigned to include in the document the establishment of an elected railroad commission with extensive powers to regulate rates. When that effort failed, the reformers compromised and accepted a provision in the document that gave the legislature sweeping authority over railroad rates.

The 1906 gubernatorial campaign in the Democratic primary (complicated by the nonbinding selection of candidates to replace Alabama’s two elderly and ill U.S. senators should they die in office before the next legislative session) was one of the most memorable in Alabama’s history. The Democratic Party dropped the word “Conservative” from its formal name, demonstrating that it was now comfortable with a more Progressive platform. The state’s railroads supported Comer’s chief opponent, Lt. Gov. Russell Cunningham, but the line between progressives and conservatives was not clearly drawn. On issues other than railroad rates, Cunningham was as progressive as Comer, who came under severe criticism for his opposition to child labor reform. Comer was a better campaigner and orator than Cunningham, and his verbal attacks on the railroads so aroused Alabama audiences that he won the primary with 61 percent of the vote and the November election with more than 85 percent. A majority of the legislators elected were committed to rate reform, and with this sympathetic legislature to enact and implement his programs, Comer proved to be one of Alabama’s most effective governors.

Comer’s administration as governor had a profound impact on Alabama. He used his powers to aid both the general public and business interests. His successful anti-railroad campaign protected industry—especially cotton mills—from paying excessive rates, and control of the rates also protected consumers. His administration made great strides in education, public health, road building, and conservation of the state’s resources. On the other hand, Comer’s attempt to bring Prohibition to the state failed, and his lukewarm approach to child labor was not laudable. He discussed reform of the convict-leasing system but ended up simply trying to find ways to make the system bring more revenue to the state. His actions in the coal strike of 1908 demonstrated that his view of labor had changed little from his plantation days. Comer was a progressive, but a conservative one.

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