Notorious Antebellum North Alabama by O’Brien John;

Author:O’Brien, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mollie Teal Mansion. Courtesy of the Madison County Special Collections.

However, in Huntsville in the early 1820s, a group of prostitutes ran afoul of the law often enough that one might glean a better understanding of their life and life for women like them during the territorial and early statehood periods. The first record of prostitutes in the city of Huntsville comes from the September term of the 1820 circuit court. Joseph Eastland, the solicitor for the city, charged seven women. He alleged that on January 1, 1820, “and on divers other days and times,” they operated a “certain Bawdy house” within city limits.

Alabama officially entered the Union on December 14, 1819, so the new year of 1820 held symbolic significance for the state’s inhabitants. They left their brief sojourn as the Alabama Territory and entered fully into nationhood. With all of the intense feelings about statehood, it was inevitable that the new year attracted revelry, but the court describes nothing less than a new Gomorrah.

Rodah Barnett, Mary Baker, Elizabeth Burton, Mary King, Ann Martin, Barbara Wilson and Lucinda Wilson lived in Huntsville and kept a “certain Bawdy house unlawfully and wickedly.” The court described them as spinsters, a colloquial term used to describe unmarried women regardless of age. Though it later morphed to become synonymous with an older unmarried woman, during this time, officials might classify a young woman as a spinster more readily than use the legal terminology feme sole. Certainly not all spinsters were prostitutes who ran “Bawdy houses,” and not all prostitutes were unmarried; but when dealing with this group of women and their court cases in the early 1820s, the traditional moniker for an unwed woman took on a secondary connotation in the language used by the court.65

As for their “Bawdy house,” the fact that the women “unlawfully” kept it means either all prostitution was banned within the city limits or the women involved failed to purchase licenses for their business. This point is inconclusive because the earliest city council minutes have been lost. Context must provide answers. The county court frequently prosecuted unlicensed taverns. Selling liquor without a license remained one of the most common crimes during the territorial period and early statehood. The city of Huntsville needed revenue, and licensing provided one of its readiest streams of cash. This evidence suggests that the ire directed against these women might have arisen less from moral objections than from the innate desire of bureaucrats to balance their books.

However, Huntsville experienced an influx of reformers focused on public health and morality. These reformers expressed ready interest in the city government, and from the late 1820s onward they introduced a variety of ordinances focused on preventing pollution in the Big Spring, funding public education and an ill-fated attempt at temperance. Contemporary reformist sentiment, combined with the vitriol found in the court’s description of the women and their “Bawdy house,” points to a banning of prostitution within city limits and their outright flouting of local ordinances.

One can also draw

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