Youngville at Dawn
Alexander City, Alabama 125th Anniversary 1873-1998
By Bob Saxon, Editor
The land was quintessential Piedmont: rolling hills, red soil, a creek every two miles, trails through hardwood forest, cane brakes, clear grassy meadow. The settler understood the task before him. For over one hundred years his ancestors had lived and supported their families on this kind of land.
East Alabama in the 1830s was not a cutting edge frontier, although it must have seemed so to the families living in temporary shelters in the woods. It was the territory remaining to some 23,000 Creek Indians who had surrendered their other Alabama lands eighteen years earlier following their defeat at Horseshoe Bend. The Creek Cession was a wilderness enclave that was bypassed as the tide of settlers swept on to the west twenty years earlier. More than a third of a million people lived in the older surrounding Alabama counties. The western frontier of the United States was already across the Mississippi River.
The Creek Nation in March 1832 ceded to the United State government their last remaining lands in Alabama, some five million acres situated between the Chattahoochee and Coosa Rivers. The Alabama legislature, meeting in Tuscaloosa in December 1832, created from the cession nine counties including Tallapoosa. About 1,500 Indians attached to the towns of Hilibi, Oaktasasi, Fish Pond, and Okfuskee lived west of the Tallapoosa River in the new county. Less than a dozen whites lived there. Following the cession, settlers swarmed across the Chattahoochee River from Georgia and from the adjacent Alabama counties. Under the terms of the treaty, settlers were to be excluded from the cession until the lands were surveyed, Indians reserves located, and the land make ready for sale. These orderly procedures were ready for sale. These orderly procedures were ignored. The first whites on the scene were squatters illegally setting down on the public domain. United States Marshal, Robert Crawford, trying desperately and unsuccessfully in Chambers County to keep squatters off property reserved to individual Indian families declared that “among the intruders were some of the most lawless and uncouth men I have ever seen.” following on the heels of the settlers came the agents of land companies located in Montgomery and Columbus to buy up Indian Reserves and public land for re-sale to settlers.
Three hundred and twenty acres was reserved for each Indian household. It was generally understood that the Indian family would sell their property to a white settler and then move with the rest of the tribe to land set aside for them in the present state of Oklahoma. Just over two million acres was reserved to Indian families, the remaining three million acres was added to the public domain. Most of the land within the future Youngville, including the historic center of Alexander City, was in the public domain. To th north of Youngville on Oaktasasi, Town, and Hillabee Creeks, most fo the land was reserved to an Indian family. Much of the best bottomland on Oaktasasi and other nearby creeks was assigned to the wealthy mixed-blood Graysons, descendants of Robert Grierson, a white trader in the Hillibi town. The Graysons sold their property and moved with the tribe to Oklahoma.
Surveyors finished the task of marking the cession off in the conventional thirty-six square mile numbered townships and locating individual Indian reserves by the end of 1833. Agents of land companies moved among the Indians to purchase their property. The illiterate natives, unfamiliar with contracts and property titles, were easy targets for the unscrupulous speculators.
The settlers who took up land around Youngville in the mid 1830s were not the area’s first white or black residents. People of European and african ancestry had resided in the Creek Nation for over one hundred and thirty years. Robert Grierson, a white planter and trader, owned a plantation among th Hilibi just north of the present Alexander City. Benjamin Hawkins, the American Indian Agent, on a visit to Grierson’s plantation in 1798 was impressed with his progressive agricultural methods and his efforts to teach the Indians to spin and weave. There were many such whites and blacks living among the Creeks, and some like Grierson, were quite wealthy and influential; however, they were isolated individuals living in a dominant Indian culture. The white and black settlers who came to the Youngville area in the mid 1830s planted their American society and culture. It is they, therefore, who should be called Youngville’s first settlers. Symbolically, January 1, 1834, the date public land went on sale, marks the beginning of that dominance.
Unlike the flood of settlers who coveted the cotton lands below of the river fall line, the pace of settlement was slower on the upper reaches of the Tallapoosa. Nevertheless, speculators and settlers were on the scene early on. from this distance in time it is not easy to separate settler from speculator. Sometimes they were both. Benjamin Young in May 1834 purchased what may have been the first land bought in the future Alexander City when he paid an Indian, we-ge-gar, $135 for 320 acre tract near the present junction of North Central Avenue and Highway 63. The next year Young sold the property to Willis Whatley for $300.
Benjamin Young and one of his brothers, Bird H. young, were partners in a company speculating in Indian and federal land. Both Benjamin and Bird and two other brothers, James and Harrison Young settled in Tallapoosa County. Bird Young later became an Alabama celebrity as the model for Johnson Jones Hooper’s fictional character Simon Suggs. He made his home just west of present Alexander City near the Coosa County line.
James Young purchased from and Indian a 320 acre tract at the junction of present Highway 280 and 22 about a mile west of the center of Alexander City. The property was favored by a prolific spring, a feature that probably attracted Young to the site. Although these were dozens of tother settlers who came to the section about the same time, there is no reason to dispute the consensus choice of James Young, by early Alexander City historians as the Youngville’s first settler.
