During the first half of the 19th century, the eastern part of the Mississippi Territory (the part which became the Alabama Territory and in 1819, the state of Alabama) was a crossroads for pioneers moving westward. The earliest ones came as squatters, long before the land was opened for settlement. Some rested and moved on, while others stayed, and as statehood neared the stream of arriving wagon trains continued to bring more and more settlers.

They came primarily from Virginia and the Carolinas, many stopping in Tennessee or Georgia for a time to rest their livestock and grow food, to renew their resources, or to await the birth of a child or the death of an elderly parent. Families usually stayed together for their mutual security and when one migrated all migrated. For this reason, many of the wagon trains moving southwesterly into the present Alabama were made up of the neucleus and various extentions of only one family. Oftentimes, however, their makeup accomodated an assottment of families, and sometimes an entire town migrated in one long wagon train. This was never more true than in the late 18 teens and early 18 twenties when an excitement called "Alabama fever" broke out in South Carolina. During those years, entire counties in Alabama were populated almost exclusively by wagon train loads of South Carolinians who had heard of the good land, mild climate, and abundance of waterways to be found there. In Tennessee , many had heard of it from Davy Crockett who had come into Alabama with Andrew Jackson during the Creek wars (1813-14) and returned to Tennessee telling of the wonders of the neighboring territory to the south.

They entered Alabama by several different routes. From Virginia, many took the Valley Road, or "The Long Grey Trail", which followed the course of an ancient Indian footpath into the Carolinas, From North Carolina some turned westward into Tennessee while others continued southward into South Carolina and Georgia.

Of those who went into Tennessee, some continued westward into Arkansas, or prior to statehood in 1836, the Arkansas Territory, and never saw Alabama. Others turned southward into Alabama. Some crossed the Tennessee River at a place called Ditto’s Landing, near present Huntsville, and came into west central Alabama by way of the Old Huntsville Road, which had been another ancient Indian trail out of Tennessee, and which connected with the Great Trading Path at Elyton (now Birmingham) and continued in a southwesterly direction across Alabama and into Mississippi.

As for the settlers who went by way of Georgia, most entered Alabama by one of two ways. The Great Trading Path, which had been the main Indian trail connecting the tribes of Georgia and the Carolinas with those of Alabama and Mississippi, came into Alabama in the northeastern sector, connected with the Old Huntsville Road, and continued into Mississippi. The other was called "The Three Notch Way." It ran further south, and was one of the few pioneer routes that didn’t follow an old Indian trail.

By whatever route any early settlers reached Alabama, the journey could not have been other than arduous. The majority of the immigrants who settled in west central Alabama came into the region in open farm wagons drawn by teams of oxen. Sometimes with few possessions other than the legendary "axe and rifle" of the pioneer…including the family Bible.

The reason oxen were used instead of horses is that oxen are much stronger than either horses or mules. Two or three wagons traveling alone were in grave peril, so the longer the wagon train, the greater the degree of safety. As a general thing, every male beyond the age of about nine knew how to load and fire a muzzle-loading shotgun, an unpredictable weapon, which might explode during loading if not handled carefully, and a muzzle-loading rifle which had a longer range and was more accurate.

The Indians were only an occasional problem in this part of the country. For one thing, they were generally peaceful, and the settlers usually respected their lands by either going around them, or securing permission to pass through unmolested.

At night the travelers camped near water, and if the weather was cool, found a campsite near a pine thicket, for the excellent shelter the pine trees provided. Their food was game killed during the day by the outriders, supplemented by whatever wild greens were growing in the area, usually poke salad and lamb’s quarter (roughly the equivalents of spinach and turnip greens), which they boiled, and water cress and dandelion greens, which they drizzled with hot pork drippings and ate otherwise uncooked (this was called wilted salad). In season there were blackberries, huckleberries (the name they gave to the rabbit-eye variety of blueberries which grew wild throughout the southland), wild plums, muscadines (a large thick-skinned variety of blue grapes which grew wild in abundance), and scuppernongs (a golden-colored variety of the same). Their bread was almost always cornbread, baked in the campfire in the form of ash cakes (poured on to a hot flat rock in the coals) or hoe cakes, which originally were baked on the blade of a hoe (or the scoop of a shovel), but were also sometimes fried in pork drippings. (We call it skillet bread.) The travelers slept in the open, or in case of rain, under the wagons. A fire was kept burning all night, as protection against panthers, their deadliest enemy from the wild.

Wild hogs were a menace to anyone on foot in daytime, but they never attacked at night. Black bears also roamed the southern woodlands, but were generally shy animals, and rarely attacked.

Crossing the streams and the hog’s-back Appalachian foothills of the region was a major problem, and most of the wagon-trains to enter Alabama had crossed more than one of each. They forded the rivers at the shallows, and passed through the mountain gaps, but even so, the journey was difficult beyond any travel we can imagine today, and many a settler and many a beast of burden died along the way.

As to ethnic origin, the earliest settlers to reach west central Alabama were largely of Celtic stock, descendants of early Virginia colonists, having their ancestral roots in the British Isles, with a later admixture of Scotch-Irish among those who came from South Carolina. In the 1830s and 1840s, a mix of German, French, Italian, and Swiss began arriving, although admittedly not in large numbers. All came searching for some dreamed-of new tomorrow in the hill country of central Alabama. Although some who came were well-to-do, few were rich and the migration depleted the resources of many. Rare it was to find a farmer among them who owned more than twenty slaves: most owned none, and though not out-right anti-slavery, many didn't care for the idea in principle. When they did own slaves, the slaves often lived more or less as members of the family, and when a slave died, the usual thing was that they were buried in the family burying ground with their white family.

In the southern part of the state is the black belt, so called because of the rich loamy black soil. The land is flat, and in the days of the antebellum plantations, the cotton fields stretched to the horizon from every great house. In between the northern Tennessee Valley and the southern black belt, lies the Alabama hill country, the area with which this collection is mostly concerned, with some spillover into the black belt of Greene, Sumter, and Maringo counties. In the agricultural south of the pre-Civil War era, it was a region of mostly small farms, strategically located on or near several major migratory trails, and therefore a stopover place for settlers who eventually moved further west. Some moved on as soon as they rested, others stayed for a few years, and some remained, and they or their descendants witnessed the end of the antebellum era in the southland.

The end began on 12 April 1861 with a move by South Carolina to take Fort Sumter by force, precipitating the outbreak of the American Civil War, one of the bloodiest and surely one of the most senseless wars of all times. When it finally ended, the pioneer families of the area were in some cases completely obliterated, and in all cases decimated, and the gentle nature of the southland was dead and gone forever, sadly replaced by a facade of quiet acceptance of their lot, with a flip side of smoldering rage.

The census of 1850 was, as in most genealogical research, the pivotal source, because, being the first census in which the individual names were listed, other than heads of households, it is the most complete record we have of the pioneer families up until that time. The 1860 census is also important because of being the last record we have of these same families before the outbreak of the Civil War, and in many cases the last record we have of them ever, since many families were completely wiped out by the double onslaught of first the Civil War and then its aftermath of disease, hunger, and deprivation. By the time of the 1870 census many families had simply disappeared from the records.

It is hoped that each reader will, short of finding an elusive, long searced for, Alabama ancestor, find some bit of information giving heart to the search, and concurrently find reason to be ever more proud of our rich Alabama heritage. Madge Pettit April 1988. Publisher, Heritage Books, Inc., 1540E Pointer Ridge Place, Bowie, Maryland 20716. ISBN 1-55613-125-9. Madge is allowing my/our use of the above excerpts from her Introduction by her gracious permission. The bolding above was added by the web-site author for emphasis of information.

This web-site author has many books on family history/settlers’ migrations, but Madge’s Book and its Introduction as to West Central Alabama, is the most interesting and succinct view of migration of settlers to our Greene County area in my opinion.

I inquired of Madge as to a couple of interesting items regarding our earliest Hendersons migrating from South Carolina: (1) Whether they may have come direct to Alabama through Georgia, or possibly through Tennessee (having stayed or lived there some) then into Alabama? (2) Whether they possibly came into Greene County (actually to Tuscaloosa County first) down the Black Warrior River? As of yet none of us (to my knowledge) have matched our original Greene County Hendersons to their parents and homeplace in South Carolina.

Madge responded to question (1) that "Yes, your Hendersons certainly could have come through Tennessee to get from South Carolina to Alabama. Many of the settlers did. And yes, they may have lived in Tennessee for a time. At that time, most people were poor, and migrating was a strain on their resources. Many of them stopped in Tennessee for one or more crop-years, to grow food, renew their resources, and rest their animals. As for how they may have come to Alabama from there, most people coming from Tennessee, including some of my ancestors, came into Alabama above Huntsville, crossed the Tennessee River about where Lacey’s Landing is today, then took the Old Huntsville Road, which cut a swoosh down through Alabama to Tuscaloosa."

Madge responded to question (2) that "I can just about assure you that your ancestors didn’t reach the Black Belt of Alabama by way of the Black Warrior. It just wasn’t the done thing. They would have had to travel on a flatboat or raft, and it just couldn’t have been done. Furthermore, at Tuscaloosa, the river splits into Locust Fork and the Mulberry Fork, which are barely more than large creeks."

All the above most interesting information is hoped to be of value in understanding our ancestors migration to Alabama. Milton Eugene Henderson