Prattville Dragoons at the Millbrook Revelers' Mardi Gras Festival and Parade

SCV Camp 1524 manned a booth at the Mardi Gras festival in the Millbrook Village Green Park on Saturday February 15th displaying the camp banner, the SCV flag and an informational poster on the Dragoons while handing out free SCV brochures, Alabama Division educational posters, mini-Battle flags and SCV coins.  The booth was set up at 7:30am by Commander Waldo, 2nd Lt Karl Wade and Quartermaster Bill Myrick.  The festival opened at 9am and the booth stayed busy all day with all the mini-Battle flags, over a hundred, handed out throughout the day.  3x5 ft flags including Confederate Battle flags, Confederate First Nationals, Bonnie Blues, Gadsden flags and Betsy Ross U.S. flags were also sold from the camp stores along with Confederate satchels and car tags to raise money for the camp treasury and to provide these heritage items to the general public.  2nd Lt Wade stayed at the booth all day long and was joined throughout the day by Commander Waldo, Quartermaster Myrick with his cousin and family, Color Sgt John Dennis with his family, and compatriots Dale Boyles, Tyrone Crowley, and Andy Bodenheimer.

The Dragoons also fielded an entry in the Mardi Gras parade which is billed as the largest north of Mobile.  It was a great entry which included the truck of Color Sgt Dennis with the camp's Mardi Gras banner strung across the front followed by the appropriately colored purple Dodge Charger of Commander Waldo with Mardi Grad decorations and a couple of Confederate Battle flag car flags, Comms Ofc Beir Butler's golf cart decked with Mardi Gras decorations with a large Battle Flag and Alabama Secession flag off the back and bringing up the rear were Don Owens and Chop Chop with the Mechanized Cavalry joined by Dragoon Bill Hamner on their Harley Davidsons.  Commander Waldo and 1st Lt Harold Grooms and Quartermaster Myrick walked the parade route.  The families of Dennis, Waldo and Myrick rode in the vehicles and enjoyed waving to the spectators and throwing candy and goodies to the crowds also.  Hundreds of mini-Battle flags and SCV coins along with bags of candy were distributed to spectators all along Main Street in Millbrook as the parade route took participants from Mill Creek Park about a mile north to just past the Village Green Park.  The SCV entry is always one of the most popular and it's always a festive time in the Revelers Mardi Grad parade and festival in Millbrook. 

Flatboats and Steamboats of the Antebellum Coosa River, Popeye and Captain Cummins Lay

Alabama Division 2nd Lt Tim Steadman addressed the Dragoons of SCV Camp 1524 in Prattville on Thursday February 13th.  Tim started his presentation with a tidbit claiming Popeye was an Alabama boy.  The story originated in 1913 about the Oil family which had a son named Castor and daughter named Olive who ran a shipping company on the Coosa River.  Popeye was a hand working for them and cartoonist Tom Sims spun him off to his own strip as an ocean-going sailor.  https://www.al.com/strange-alabama/2014/07/popeye_alabamas_sailor_man.html

The Coosa River is one of the oldest geological formations in North America - the Coosa was flowing before the Mississippi.  Flat bottom river boats worked from Rome GA to Wetumpka AL in the early-mid 1800s trading goods in communities and plantation along the river.  The boats would be disassembled in Wetumpka where the shoals made the river unnavigable and then tey were transported over land back to Rome GA to make the trip back downstream with goods for trading.

In 1845, Captain James Lafferty brought the USS Coosa to the river, the first steamboat to ply these waters.  The ship was built in Ohio and Lafferty sailed it down the Ohio to the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico then back up the Alabama River to Wetumpka where it was disassembled and transported overland to Rome GA.  Before the War for Southern Independence, Captain Cummins Lay piloted both flatboats and steamboats along the Coosa River.  During the War, Lay continued to work the river helping the Confederate war effort maintaining this commerce. 

The raid by Union Col. Abel Streight in May of 1863 was meant to capture the armory at Rome GA which was supplied by the furnaces of Gadsden AL which provided the iron and steel for the munitions factory there in Rome. The steamboats left Rome to avoid capture by the Yankees as these were critical to supply provisions along the Coosa River.  Confederate General N.B. Forrest captured Streight before he could carry out his raid and prevented the capture of the Rome armory.

In 1864, Union Gen. Sherman sent troops again to capture Rome and they commenced by shelling the town as was typical.  The steamboats Alpharetta and the Laura Moore (under Capt. Lay) there set sail in the darkness of night with bales of cotton on deck protecting the pilot house and boiler from shot and shell.  They successfully made it to Greensport just south of Gadsden AL which was as far south on the Coosa that powered navigation (by steamboat) was possible and there they nervously awaited capture.  But, Capt. Lay used the flood conditions to sail over the shoal rapids there and made it to Montgomery where he offered the steamboat for Confederate service.  Lay was not a pensioned Confederate soldier but his family recognized his service to the Confederacy as was reflected on his grave marker.

After the War, Lay sailed the Laura Moore back to Rome using flood waters to navigate the shoals by even sailing into flooded crop fields and he continued sailing the steamboats for years thereafter.  The steamboat commerce was vital in the post-War years to facilitate the meager functioning economy.  Lay was the only captain to successfully sail north upstream on the Coosa River and, the river is dammed today preventing such navigation.  Lay led the Coosa River Improvement Association which meant to build a series of locks to allow river navigation but the project was never finished as railroads supplanted steamboats as the preferred method of travel and shipping.  The Coosa River was dammed for hydroelectric generation began by Alabama Power.  The first such was named Lay Dam after Cummins Lay's son who was the first CEO of Alabama Power, a Confederate connection. 

Prattville Dragoons SCV Camp 1524 February 2020 Meeting

The Dragoons held their camp meeting for February at the Mason's lodge in downtown Prattville on Thursday evening the 13th enjoying a plate of hot dogs, chips and cookies at 6pm before the meeting proper.  Compatriot Bill Branch opened the program at 6:45 with an invocation then Commander Waldo read General Stephen Dill Lee's Charge to the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  Darrell Haywood was introduced as the newest camp member having been sworn in by the commander and former Chaplain Branch before the meeting.  Upcoming events were then highlighted including the Army of Tennessee workshop, the National Museum grand opening and many more.  Announcements included camp  donations to the Alabama Archives for flag conservation and the Confederate Legion Make Dixie Great Again campaign.  Alabama Division 2nd Lt Tim Steadman was the guest speaker who presented a fascinating discussion on the flatboats, steamboats and commerce along the Coosa River between Rome Georgia and Wetumpka AL before and during the War Between the States.  Steadman also discussed two amendments which are proposed for the Division Reunion in Foley AL in June.  About two dozen compatriots were in attendance and enjoyed the food, friendship and educational program.

Prattville Dragoons SCV Camp 1524 Chaplain's Column for February 2020

Make a Stand for a Future of Promise

Dear Compatriots! My prayers are with everyone this February. It has been a rainy winter but thankfully not to terribly cold! We have many that are sick and in need of our prayers.

 "The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future--a future full of golden promise."

- Jefferson Davis

I pray for all of you, your families, and your future. Let us honor our ancestors with their sacrifice so long ago. Let us also use their sacrifice to continue standing for all the things that are right in this world. Recently, I paid a price for standing for my beliefs and the principles I carry.

I am not afraid of being ridiculed or persecuted. I will always stand for what is right no matter the cost.

Our ancestors stood for principle and what was right. Let us be inspired to seize the day and lead the charge to stand for the very things our country was founded upon.

Our life is like a vapor, so short, but we can leave a mark that carries on forever.

Stand for God, family, and our Constitution! To God be the Glory! Amen!

Remember those on our prayer list.

Prattville Dragoons SCV Camp 1524 Commander's Column for February 2020

Ivy League Elitism and Enlightenment

My daughter asked me the other day why anyone would want to go to Yale or Harvard.  A girl at her school had announced that she had been accepted to Yale and so some of my daughter’s classmates proclaimed they wanted to attend an Ivy League school.  Being born and raised in Prattville Alabama, my 6th grade daughter knows little of collegiate echelons although her parents certainly have emphasized education including instruction at a non-state funded private school.  I attempted to explain to her that the Ivy League schools and New England in a broader sense are controlled by elitists who seek to propagate a higher standard of living literally thru a higher cost of living (and tuition) with resultant higher salaries.  This has resulted in the recent Yankee migration to the South driving up real estate prices and furthering a continued Reconstruction in our states as is readily evidenced by the political winds of change in North Carolina and Virginia where state governments overtaken by carpetbaggers and scalawags have infringed on the citizens Constitutional rights and targeted Southern heritage removing Battle flags and Confederate war memorials.  I explained to her that this can be illustrated by sororities and fraternities which among other functions serve as business networks and that these organizations (and others such as Skull and Bones) are particularly strong in Ivy League schools - https://www.businessinsider.com/yales-wealthiest-secret-societies-2015-12.  The saying is the rich get richer and the Ivy League system is designed to ensure this as much as possible with post graduate school and hiring preferences/nepotism.   I made the point that while Harvard medical school and John Hopkins are renowned, UAB and Emory are obviously terrific medical institutions arguably on a par excepting the aforementioned endowments. 

This got me thinking along a wider scope regarding the economic disadvantages of being a Southerner today and I read with interest the article “Being Southern in an Age of Radicalism” by Dr. Clyde Wilson in the recent SCV Camp 1640 “Traveller” newsletter.   “If you are Southern or interested in the South you are the most deplorable of all the deplorables. There is no place for you among the enlightened and virtuous people of 21st Century America.  The North or mainstream America or the Age of Radicalism (has held the) South (as) an economic colony and a cultural whipping boy since well before the War for Southern Independence.”  He used as an illustration an “Ivy League savant (who) characterised the present truly deplorable condition of once wealthy and productive Detroit as “an Alabama ghetto.” We have now had three generations born and raised in Detroit, but if there is something wrong, you see, it must be the fault of the South. To invoke Alabama explains it all.”  Yankees are “diseased in mind and character. They imagine something they call the South which does not exist. To identify this as the source of evil in an otherwise pure and shining American society is for them a sign of superior intelligence and virtue. This defect is present, I fear, in millions of Americans, including some Southerners.  American mainstream society is devoid of religion and any real culture, as well as of self-knowledge.  It has no self except in contrast that imaginary evil “other” that is standing in the way of perfection.   John C. Calhoun said that the South was the balance wheel of the Union. Without the South, America would go wild and fly apart. In this time when the South has lost almost all power and influence, is not that exactly what has happened? Is that not why we are in the “Age of Radicalism”?  Southerners are always being called upon to stop being themselves and become more like other Americans.  What civilized people would want to keep up with the mainstream America that is sunk in materialism, intellectual trivia, moral depravity, and that anti-culture called diversity? Mel Bradford the South “As a vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity assumed by those who have contributed to it.” It is a shared identity of values and behaviour, perhaps even of personality, and it has lasted a long time and is much more venerable, humane, and constructive than that artificial and dubious creation known at the U.S. government.  Count Hermann Keyserling in 1929 said, “When the American nation finds itself culturally, the hegemony will inevitably pass over to the South. There alone can there be a question of enduring culture. The region below the Potomac possesses the type that was truly responsible for America’s greatness in the past. This is the type of the Southern gentleman, with the corresponding type of woman. For these are the only types of complete souls that the United States has yet produced.” “

“Everything good about the South became American. In the mainstream understanding of American history, the great Southerners who created and nourished the United States were “Americans,” that is, they were honorary Yankees.  So Washington and Jefferson were put on Mount Rushmore along with Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to suggest some sort of American, that is, Yankee tradition.  In fact Washington and Jefferson would have despised Lincoln and Roosevelt as betrayers of the Founding.  It seems now that the lie is not working so well. It has come home that Washington and Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were Southern slaveholders, so there is a rising demand that they be expunged along with Confederates.  Since Southern plantation owners were Presidents for 50 out of the first 72 years of the United States, as were most other significant leaders, American history must go. New Orleans can no longer celebrate its greatest hero, a slaveholder. If we are to put under the ban all slaveholders then we have wiped away all of the earliest and best part of American history. That, of course, is exactly what is intended.  As Dr. Livingston and Dr. McClanahan have shown, from the beginning the South was America and America was the South. With good will, the South gave all to build the United States. Southerners all along thought of the Union as an agreement in good faith for mutual benefit of all the States. They served it in a spirit of patriotism and honour. From the very first day the ruling elements of the North considered the Union as a way to make themselves some easy money.  The Revolutionary War was won in the South by Southerners, although New England historians lied so industriously that most people see the winning of independence through a New England lens. In both the colonial and antebellum eras, the South was the productive part of the American economy, its products in great demand internationally. And it was the most prosperous as well. The North could not produce anything that Europe could not make for itself, thus the tariff that forced all American consumers to guarantee profits to Northern industrialists and a national debt that did the same for bankers.  Remember, in 1860 Lincoln was rejected by 60% of the American people. But he and his party got control of the federal machinery and waged a brutal war of conquest against the Southern people that no one previously could have imagined possible.  Philip Leigh’s SOUTHERN RECONSTRUCTION and PUNISHED BY POVERTY by Ronald and Donald Kennedy show that Reconstruction has never ended. We remain a colony of the ruling class of mainstream America to be impoverished for their benefit and hectored for our sins.”  And the Ivy League elitists proliferate their progressive enlightenment and the Southern economic fiefdom. 

Upcoming Events for Confederate Compatriots

Upcoming Events

Alabama Division DEC – 9:30am Saturday, February 8^th, Grace Point Church, Montgomery AL

Dragoons February Camp Meeting – Thursday, February 13^th, 6:30pm, Uncle Mick’s, 136 W. Main St., Prattville

Stephen Dill Lee Institute - Friday, Saturday, February 14, 15, 2020, Raleigh, NC

Millbrook Mardi Gras Parade and Festival - Saturday, February 15, 9am festival and noon parade, Main St, Millbrook

Army of Tennessee Workshop - Saturday, February 29, 2020, 10:00 am, Oxford Civic Center, Oxford, AL

SWC Brigade Meeting - Sunday, March 1^st, 2020

Confederate Flag Day Observance - Saturday, March 7^th, 2020

Alabama Education Conference - Saturday, March 21, 2020, 10:00am – 3:00 pm, Doster Center, Prattville

Living History Weekend - Friday, Saturday, April 24, 25, 2020, Confederate Memorial Park, Marbury, AL

Confederate Memorial Day Observance - Monday, April 27, 2020, Confederate Monument, Alabama Capitol

Alabama Division Reunion - Friday, Saturday, June 5, 6, 2020, Foley, AL

National Reunion - Wed-Sat, July 15-18, 2020, St. Augustine, FL