Historic hiking trails including one along a former stagecoach route lead past restored cabins where workers demonstrate old-style crafts of painting, throwing pots and making paper. Cornmeal is ground at the reconstructed John Wesley Hall grist mill, and Tannehill Farm includes a working blacksmith house, sorghum mill, pioneer cabins and an 1812 dairy barn. In Montgomery, Old Alabama Town is a different sort of 19th-century recreation. This assemblage of authentic period barns, a Grange hall, one-room schoolhouse, cotton gin, carriage house and church covers three downtown blocks. For a glimpse into life of the period's poor, visit the authentic shotgun house that's wedged onto a narrow lot.
Newspaper lining the walls is the insulation.
The tiny front room is sparsely furnished, the back room is set up for washing the family that lived here took in laundry to earn money. Jr. He preached from this pulpit, and parishoners have painted a huge mural in the basement depicting his civil rights journey from Montgomery to Memphis. Nearby stands the Civil Rights Memorial, just outside the Southern Poverty Law Center. Designed by Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., the 1989 memorial is a circular wall of Canadian black granite. Water cascades from the center of a circular fountain, and names of 40 people who died in the civil rights movement are inscribed on the side.