Monday, August 19, 2013

LIFE LIST UPDATE – No. 648: Take the downtown Selma walking tour

Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge
I’ve lived in Alabama almost my entire life, but for whatever reason I’d never been to the city of Selma, that is, until Saturday when I made the trip there to take the downtown Selma walking tour. Selma is located in Dallas County along the banks of the Alabama River. Incorporated in 1820, it currently has a population of nearly 21,000 residents.

I honestly don’t remember where I first heard about the city’s downtown walking tour, which was put together by the Selma-Dallas County Tourism Department, but I’ve had this tour on my “life list” for a few years. This walking tour is self-guided, that is, you take it by yourself without the aid of a formal tour guide and you travel at your own pace. Selma’s about 75 miles from my house in Monroe County, and I made the drive up there Saturday to scratch this item off of my “life list.”

The walking tour is only about one mile long, but it is jammed packed with cool, historic sites. Selma’s largely known for its place in Civil Rights history, but the city’s been around for much longer than that and was an important city for a number of reasons besides what happened there in the 1960s. Selma is so rich in history that it’s hard to turn around on any given downtown street and not see a historical marker of some sort.

The tour begins at the Selma-Dallas County Library on Broad Street. From there you head up to the City of Selma Municipal Complex, which is in the old Hotel Albert building. Outside this building also sits a huge, old Civil War cannon called the Brooke Cannon.

The tour highlights a number of old, historic churches in downtown Selma, including the First Presbyterian Church, the First Baptist Church, the Church Street United Methodist Church and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Other historic buildings on the tour include the Center for Commerce, the Walton Theatre, the Dallas County Courthouse, the Federal Building, the Vaughan Smitherman Museum, the Old Carneal Auto Building, the Bienville Monument, the Harmony Club, the National Voting Rights Museum, the Songs of Selma Park, Lafayette Park, the Bridge Tender’s House, the St. James Hotel, Riverfront Park, Phoenix Park, the Selma Interpretive Center, the Kress Building and the Selma Welcome Center.

One stop on the tour that I thought was especially cool was the Arsenal Place Pillars, which were erected in 1931 to mark the site of the Confederate Arsenal from the Civil War. Selma was an important ordinance manufacturing center during that war, and the arsenal was destroyed by the Union in 1865.

I also got a kick out of seeing the Selma Times-Journal building, which is located on Water Avenue at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This newspaper has been published continually since 1828, and it’s currently located in an old storefront building that once served as a grocery store.

I’d say the highlight of the tour was actually getting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on foot. I drove over it on my way into town, but there is no better way to appreciate this impressive structure than to walk across it on foot. Erected in 1939, it’s named after a U.S. Senator from Selma.

I’ve been on a number of walking tours like this one, and I thought this one was especially well done. It allowed me to learn a lot about a place that I’d never been to before, and it left me wanting to return to learn even more about this historic Alabama city. If you’re interested in taking this walking tour for yourself, visit www.selmaalabama.com, where you can download a copy of the tour material, complete with a map of downtown Selma, for free.

In the end, how many of you have ever visited Selma? What did you think about it? Have any of you taken this downtown walking tour? What did you think about it? Do you know of any other similar walking tours like this in other cities? Let us know in the comments section below.

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