Free Orphan Girl by Lila Beckham Page A

Miss Gilly gave me a doubtful look, then sat up straight and resumed shelling peas.
    “Sharecropping…,” she said as if testing her voice.
    “Um hum,” I murmured, nodding my head.
    “I’ll start off giving you a few facts about this place first, if that’s alright.”
    “Yes, Ma’am, You can say whatever comes to mind.”
    “Well, these days, I do tend to speak my mind. I done got too old to worry about what folks think of me,” she said with a chuckle.
    “I wouldn’t want it any other way, Miss Gilly. Grandmother was like that too.”
    “Where do you want me to start?”
    “You can begin with your name, Miss Gilly.”
    “Alright then, my name is Gillian Jacobs Eubanks, “Gilly” for short,” she said and smiled. “Farming has long been a way of life around here, especially after white men settled here. This area was part of the territory of thousands of indigenous people. Even the Indians that lived here before us were farmers of one sort or another.
    When white folks come to explore this place, the Choctaw and Creek people were already here. They lived and hunted in the area. White men first explored this place, back in the 1700s. The land around here was fertile and found to possess healing herbs and mineral springs. Word spread of all the wonders and the beauty of the place, and when the territory opened up for settlement after the turn of the century, white folks began coming in droves. Now, I’m talking about the turn of the nineteenth century, not the twentieth.”
    “ Yes, ma’am .”
    “Mobile was already settled. Heck, it had been settled over a hundred years by then. First by the French, then the Spanish, but those folks down there stuck close to the coast. They knew not to impinge upon the Indians territory; they valued their scalps too much for that. However, those coming here from Georgia and the Carolinas were a land hungry bunch of folks, and tough as shoe leather. They started settling the area about 1811, but it would be another eighty years before it became a jurisdiction.
    In 1892, they give it a name. The name they give it “Citronelle” was because of the citronella grass that grows wild throughout the township. That was the pivotal point in time when things began to change around here, for the better for some, but not for all.
    Late in the 1800s, the town became a popular resort destination because of the mild climate, herbs, and healing waters. Yes, Citronelle had become famous and as I said a while ago, people started arriving in droves. 
    Buildings sprang up, nearly overnight. Those wealthy upstarts from New Orleans, Atlanta, and Mobile built fine homes, a courthouse, and several restaurants. Then they built hostelries to accommodate the influx of visitors.
    A prominent doctor and his family built a grand hotel high atop a hillside north of town. The land it sat on contained over a thousand acres. That was a lot of land for one man to own. The resort they built had serpentine walks, guest cottages, tropical gardens, variegated rose gardens, and flowering trees such as dogwood, crepe myrtles, and magnolias. It even had its very own train station in front of it so that visitors could ride right up to its front doors. They named it the Hygeia. I had to look that up one time just to see what it meant. I found out Hygeia was the Greek Goddess of Health.
    Another well-known fact about this town was that on May 4, 1865, at the end of the Civil War, one of the last of the Confederate armies surrendered here. General Richard Taylor surrendered his army down yonder, under what later became known as “Surrender Oak.” This was the third in a series of five major surrenders of the war.
    The two previous surrenders occurred at Appomattox Court House, in Virginia between General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant. The second and largest surrender was at Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina. It was between General William Tecumseh Sherman and General Joseph E.