Ask McGehee
Mobile seems to have a history of becoming dissatisfied with its public meeting spaces. Each generation has touted a new auditorium or meeting space only to have the next...
Ask McGehee
One of Government Street’s most enduring landmarks is the LaClede Building with its cast-iron gallery that stretches over 250 feet west from St. Emanuel Street. The structure is actually made...
A Night at Middle Bay Lighthouse
AÂ few miles off the end of our family wharf and a little to the left lies Middle Bay Lighthouse, a famous Gulf Coast landmark since the late 1800s....
Those Rare Mobile Winters
Mobile has four seasons, wags say – early summer, middle summer, late summer and January. By this calculus, February shouldn’t be considered a winter month...
Young Pioneers
Jean Baptiste Le Moyne,  Sieur de Bienville, Founder Young adults have long played important roles in Alabama’s Port City. In fact, Mobile’s founder and guiding...
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A quarantine station was established on Dauphin Island for the port of Mobile in 1882. It would ultimately be one of more than 100 designed to protect the United States...
Reader's Choice
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War has been marked by an avalanche of good books. Besides the usual coffee-table volumes, biographies...
That Old Mobile Joy
It was a bleak December afternoon — overcast, chilly, the light rapidly fading. We were driving on one of Downtown’s less favored residential streets, and everything...
Ask McGehee
There has been a St. Mary Church at the southwestern corner of Lafayette Street and Old Shell Road since just after the end of the Civil War. Mule-drawn trolley...
Ask McGehee
Betty Bienville was a pen name used by Nettie Chandler (1869 - 1943) and her sister, Mary (1875 - 1956). Both were descendants of attorney Daniel Chandler whose...