Boy scouts visited Monroe County Indian sites nearly a century ago

While looking through old editions of The Monroe Journal, I always keep my eyes open for stories about Indian artifacts and relics. This week, while reading some 95-year-old copies of the newspaper, I found one such item in a story that appeared under the headline, “Boy Scouts Camp Near Monroeville.” That story appeared on the front page of the Sept. 11, 1930 edition of the paper and let readers know that a group of scouts from Montgomery were visiting Monroeville.

Those scouts were members of Troop No. 22, a scout troop from the Alabama Pythian Home in Montgomery. Under the leadership of Scoutmaster Travis L. Biggs, Superintendent of the Pythian Home, they were in camp “near Monroeville.” The article went on to say that a scout hut had been built and furnished for “scout camping and outing” for scouts of the Pythian Home.

“During this camp, many interesting historical Indian Reservations of earlier days will be visited by this troop,” the newspaper reported. “Some of the troop members have become interested in Indian relics by being a member of the Anthropological Society.”

A close reading of these two paragraphs shows that there is a lot of information to unpack in just a handful of sentences. First off, the Alabama Pythian Home was a children’s home operated by the Knights of Pythias in Montgomery. The Knights of Pythias was a fraternal organization similar to the Freemasons, originally founded to foster friendship between former Union and Confederate soldiers who fought against each other during the War Between the States.

For many years, Monroeville was home to a Knights of Pythias lodge known as Prairie Lodge No. 167. That lodge was in existence at least as far back as March 1901. For many years, members of that lodge met on the second and fourth Friday evenings of each month. The latest reference to this lodge that I could find in back issues of The Journal was in May 1931.

Interestingly, Travis L. Biggs was Monroe County native, Travis Lige Biggs. Born in the “Peterman Shoal Creek” community in August 1891, he was appointed Superintendent of the Alabama Pythian Home in 1926. Biggs died in March 1967, and he is buried in the Rumbley Cemetery near Peterman.

The line in the article about the construction of a scout hut leads one to wonder exactly where it was constructed. Given Biggs’s ties to the Peterman area, the hut may have been built somewhere in that part of the county. On the other hand, it may have been somewhere closer to Monroeville.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article describes the group’s plans to visit “Indian Reservations” in the Monroeville area. I take this to mean sites of old Indian villages and settlements. One is left to wonder exactly where those sites were located and what was to be seen there. Did the scouts find any Indian relics or artifacts? I can’t say for sure because there were no follow-up stories in later editions of The Journal describing their activities.