Highlights | Speakers | Schedule | Accommodations | Study Prep

Event Summary

Join Historian Bill Potter and Guide Kevin Turley as we explore historic sites of Mobile, Alabama together, in the city known for its colorful history, hospitality, and great seafood restaurants. While the rest of the country is coping with the vicissitudes of winter, we will be enjoying the warm and verdant places of providential history along the Alabama coast.

Tour Highlights

Overnight on the USS Alabama

NEW!!! – Moms and daughters can spend the night onboard!

Few things are more immersive than spending the night aboard a real battleship and sleeping in same bunks where real sailors slept. To kick off our Mobile Tour in grand style, we have reserved space for all the men and boys, and separate quarters for women and girls, that want to experience an overnight on the Alabama  on Wednesday, February 8th.

*If Dad can’t make it, the boys can still come as Mr. Potter and Mr. Turley will be spending the night and would be happy to watch out for them.

USS Alabama—Mobile Bay

When the Second World War began, battleships were the Queens of the Oceans. With the advent and development of war from the air, they became tactically secondary to aircraft carriers, but remained absolutely necessary to the survival of the carriers, the shelling of islands and ports, and the destruction of enemy planes and ships. Battle stars were awarded to the best of big battleships; one of the most important and decorated of those is berthed in Mobile Bay—the USS Alabama. Join us as we explore every deck and gun of this storied behemoth, and sleep aboard this floating museum after devouring pizzas and telling stories. You can dream of broadsides, kamikazes, and the thrills of serving aboard a battleship while you swing in your hammock on the berthing deck! In the mysteries of providence, battleships became redundant mammoth targets that now have been decommissioned, but not forgotten, in the combat tales of the Second World War. The USS Alabama site also presents excellent displays of historic aircraft, a heroic WWII submarine, and a fascinating WWII Museum and gift shop.

We will return to the Alabama on Saturday as at 1 o’clock there will be an air attack where vintage fighter planes attack the Alabama, weather permitting, and the sailors return fire from the deck guns!  The submarine USS Drum will be transformed into a German U-Boat for the day, manned with a crew of German Kreigsmarine! 

*Fort Blakeley—Civil War Swamp Boat Tour – SOLD OUT

*The Swamp Boat has reached it’s capacity but you are still able to participate in the rest of the tour at a reduced rate.

The last major battle of the Civil War took place in defense of Mobile at the Confederate Fort Blakeley. Three to four thousand Confederate soldiers—mostly old men and young boys from the Mobile militia companies, along with a couple regiments of veterans, especially the crack Missouri Brigade, with their backs to the Tensas River, tried to repel an attacking Union army of more than 16,000 well-armed, well-fed mostly veteran troops, including 5,000 black soldiers. The battlefield is well-preserved. We will join historian Bill Potter and walk the redoubts and hear the stories of heroism and sacrifice of that April day in 1865.

We have chartered The Delta Explorer to take us on an exciting narrated private excursion along the historic bay and rivers that surround the City of Mobile. We will creep through the tall grass of the alligator infested river edges and observe the flora and fauna of coastal Alabama. We will see the area where the few survivors of the defense of Fort Blakeley and Spanish Fort escaped aboard gunboats or swam the river to safety.

Fort Morgan

Travel with us to old Fort Morgan where one of the most dramatic naval and fort engagements of the war took place—The Battle of Mobile Bay. Sixty-four-year-old Yankee Tennessean, veteran of the War of 1812 and conqueror of New Orleans in 1862, Admiral David Farragut, led the naval flotilla that ran the guns of the fort and braved the minefield defending the Port of Mobile. He shut down the blockade-runners for the last time and set the stage for the capture of Mobile City, the last open port of the Confederacy.

Fort Mims

Just north of Mobile, the site of the “Fort Mims Massacre” remains as a memorial to the American pioneers who began the settlement of Alabama and triggered the entry of Andrew Jackson into the Creek tribes’ civil war, which led to the acquisition of millions of acres for the United States in the Treaty of Fort Jackson.

Colonial Fort Condé

The founding of Mobile occurred in 1702 when French explorers established a trading post there. Over the next twenty years, the Frenchmen built Fort Conde to defend their outpost and insure permanent settlement. The current reconstruction, as part of our visit to the city, shows the art of fortification in the 18^th century and houses a history museum of the French period. The city changed hands several times in the century from France to Britain to Spain and finally, in the early 19^th Century, to the United States.

Magnolia Cemetery

As is usual on our tours, we will seek out the history behind the burials at Magnolia Cemetery, which in this case include the most controversial General of the Confederacy, a man often listed among the top three of the War for Southern Independence, Braxton Bragg.  We will hear the remarkable story of Confederate nurse, Kate Cumming, a Scottish immigrant devoted to the healing arts and the Confederacy. Included in the trip to Magnolia will be a brief stop at the grave of Josiah Nott, a controversial and influential scientist, anthropologist, and phrenologist, utterly wrong in all three disciplines! Among the more than a thousand Confederate soldiers buried here is the youngest brigadier general of the war, John H. Kelly, killed at Franklin, Tennessee at age twenty-four.

Event Speakers

Accommodations

Details coming soon.

Study Preparation

Recommended Reading

• D-Day, by Stephen Ambrose
• Theodore Roosevelt: The Life of a War Hero, by H. Paul Jeffers
• Decision in Normandy, by Carlos D’Este
• A Short History of WWII, by James Stokesbury
• American Lion, by Jon Meachum