More details surface about Rose's Trail through Wilcox County

Last week in this space, I wrote about Rose’s Trail, an old path that ran from Cahaba to Fort Claiborne way back in the days of early Alabama history. In the 1950s, amateur historian Samuel Pressly Dale of Oak Hill said that this old trail was heavily used in the days before steamboats made their appearance on the Alabama River. While the history and exact path of Rose’s Trail is mostly lost to history, more information about this old path did come to light last week.

Not long after last week’s paper came out, I received a message from Steve Stacey, a noted historian and Alabama history expert who lives in Frisco City, about 50 miles south of Camden. According to his research, Rose’s Trail came out of present-day Dallas County and entered what is now Wilcox County along the route of State Highway 89, a few miles from the intersection of modern-day State Highway 41. From there, the trail went to the Neenah community, which is located on Pursley Creek, almost due west of Oak Hill.

From here, things get a little murky. Stacey’s research reflects that the trail probably continued southwest from Neenah to where the Fatama community is located today. From here, it followed the road that became State Highway 265, which connected Camden with communities in Monroe County, like Chestnut, Beatrice and Buena Vista. More than likely, the mail route from Burnt Corn (on the Monroe-Conecuh county line) likely followed the Rose Trail from Oak Hill north to Cahaba. Stacey noted that the Claiborne path also joined at Oak Hill.

For those of you who may have missed last week’s column, the conversation about Rose’s Trail was sparked by an intriguing historical article that was published in the Feb. 12, 1953 edition of The Wilcox Progressive Era. The article noted that Dale was trying to uncover more information about the trail, and he was asking “anyone who has any scrap of information regarding the trail to write him.” At that point, he had apparently already uncovered a great deal of information about the trail.

Dale was seeking information on Rose’s Trail because he planned erect a historical marker about Rose’s Trail just west of Oak Hill on State Highway 10, near the point where the old trail crossed the modern highway from Camden to Greenville. The article went on to say that Dale also planned to record a written instrument at the Wilcox County Courthouse that contained information about the trail as it ran through Wilcox and portions of Dallas and Monroe counties.

In the end, let me hear from you if you have any additional information about Rose’s Trail. My feeling is that more than a few Wilcox County residents today live along what was once Rose’s Trail, whether they know it or not. Perhaps some of them will remember older members of the community talking about this old path between two of the most important cities in early Alabama history.