Talk:Gorgas, Alabama

Page issues

One of the big problems I had when writing this page was disagreement among the sources as to where Gorgas actually is - is it in Walker County or in Tuscaloosa? GNIS lists two populated places named Gorgas - one in Walker county (333857N,0871229W) and one in Tuscaloosa (333112N,0873650W), points separated by about 24 miles. However, there being two GNIS hits for Gorgas is not conclusive as the geographical place-names provided there have been known to include errors and duplicates.

It is very unlikely that there could be two separate places named Gorgas so close together. A more likely explanation is boundary changes, or just the fact that the settlement never had any official centre and may well have drifted over time. Probably part of the explanation is that Gorgas was defined by the school catchment area which may have been pretty wide. The community being defined by the school catchment area may also explain why there is no sign of it existing nowadays - once the school disappeared, the community seems to have disappeared as well. It's notable that the GNIS listing for "Gorgas School (historical)" (ID 142359), which seems likely to be that of the closed school that was the heart of Gorgas as described in They Live on The Land, is located in Walker county presently (333918N,0871312W), though this too may be just bad information as the actual location appears to be an empty field with no sign of ever having been built on.

Particularly, a lot of stuff was written about Gorgas during the 1920s-1950s, including an entire book about the place that described it as being populated by about 1000 people (i.e., a fairly large population that, being an open rural community, would have covered a lot of land), and newspaper articles that simply refer to "the steam plant at Gorgas, Alabama", and entire scientific articles about the experiments there, without anyone mentioning the existence of another Gorgas, heavily indicates that likely the Gorgas in Walker county and the Gorgas in Tuscaloosa are/were basically the same thing. As such I've treated them as the same in this article, though indicating when something was in Walker county or not. However, there is no source conclusively stating that they are the same thing.

If anyone else has more insight about this, I'd urge them to add to the piece. FOARP (talk) 21:45, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

There were two places named or called Gorgas - one in Walker County south of Goodsprings and north of the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River. I lived there 14 years 1941-1955. There was a postoffice named Gorgas, which had been in operation since WWI. The entire area was owned by the Alabama Power Company and included a steam plant producing electricity as well as the coal mines to fire the plant. Company-owned housing was provided at small expense to the workers and their families. There was a community church and a school grades 1-9. both provided and somewhat supported by the power company. I'd guess there were about 1000 residents. All of that is gone now but Google maps will take you there.

There was also an area, near Samantha community in Tuscaloosa County, that the locals called 'Gorgas' because there was a school there named for Wm Crawford Gorgas. I am not certain of this but I doubt that it ever had a postoffice.

The cause of this confusion is the book They Lived on the Land published by the U of Ala Press. That book is only about the area in Tuscaloosa County but the back cover mistakenly proclaims it's about "...rural life in Gorgas, Alabama." But that area is agrarian and the Walker County Gorgas was entirely industrial.

My qualifications: my father was chief clerk at the mines; my father-in-law wa superintendent of the steam plant; I worked at the plant as a co-op student. Begruntled (talk) 22:41, 21 February 2023 (UTC)