Miss Dee was born in troubled times in Alabama. She arrived on January 23, 1881 in rural Macon County in a community that was known back then as La Place. It is now considered a part of the Shorter community, but is not in the town limits of the recently incorporated Town of Shorter. It lies east of the present Town of Shorter, but is within the postal ZIP Code assigned to the Shorter Post Office.
Miss Dee’s mother was Sarah Rebecca Haden. The Haden family migrated into Alabama from South Carolina, which was a very common migration pattern in the early settlement of Alabama. Times were very hard, and life was uncertain. Jesse Thompson married Sarah’s older sister Susan in 1868, but Susan died in 1868, and Jesse married Sarah in 1869. They had a son, Jesse Haden Thompson, who was Miss Dee’s older half sibling, in 1872. But then Sarah’s husband, Jesse Thompson, Died in 1873. Miss Dee’s mother, Sarah, married her father, John Finley DeBardeleben in 1877, and, William Joseph Debardeleben, Miss Dee’s older brother, was born to them March 10, 1878. Then Miss Dee was born in 1881, but her mother, Sarah, died on March 13, 1883, when Miss Dee was only 2 years old. Four months later, her father John Finlay DeBardeleben, married her mother’s sister, Mary Alice Elizabeth Haden, who helped to raise Miss Dee. After Miss Dee’s mother’s death, her father and her aunt/stepmother had five more children: John Thomas, Charles Allen, Ethel, Robert Francis, and Sara Capitola. Then her father, John Finlay DeBardeleben died in 1892, when she was only eleven years old, and Miss Dee became an orphan. Her older brother, Jesse Haden Thompson died in 1893. These many early deaths reflect the difficulties of the time. The fact that Miss Dee was an orphan makes her story all the more remarkable. Miss Dee reported in the 1960 newspaper article by Ms. Tyson that she was largely raised by her maternal grandmother Elizabeth Oldfield Haden, whose husband Joseph Thomas Haden had died in 1877, four years before Miss Dee was born.
Miss Dee’s father, John Finlay DeBardeleben, was a Methodist Preacher. Miss Dee’s grandfather, John Arthur DeBardeleben, enlisted in the Confederate army in 1864. John Finlay DeBardeleben’s grandfather was born in South Carolinan
The La Place community was located on the Old Federal Road. Pioneers had poured into Alabama, or, more accurately, bogged and bumped their way into Alabama through the Creek Indian territory that included what is now Macon County over that road. The Old Federal Road was built to connect the East Coast States and Washington D.C. to the newly acquired (1803) Louisiana Purchase. The construction of the Federal Road in 1811, cutting through the Creek Indian territory a mere 70 years before Miss Dee’s birth. The construction was a precipitating cause for the Creek Indian Wars in 1812-13 &14, which was related to the concurrent War of 1812. Macon County, where Miss Dee was born, was located in, and had been a part of the Creek territory, before it was ceded to the United States in the 1830’s. The great Indian war leader, Tecumseh, had come from Ohio only 70 years before Miss Dee’s birth, and delivered his famous fiery speech at Tuckabatchee, which is located not more than 15 miles from where she was born. But Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek Indians at nearby Horseshoe Bend in 1813.
So, General Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek Indians in those wars, and after he became President of the United States, he made arrangements to remove them from their homes and lands during the 1830’s. The removal occurred less than Fifty years before Miss Dee’s birth. Alabama became a State only 62 years before her birth. The Civil War was silenced at Appomattox only 16 years before her birth. The end of the war brought hard times for Alabama. The agrarian economy was upended by the War, and was struggling to reassert itself on a new footing. A former slave, Booker T. Washington came down from Hampton Virginia to Tuskegee, only 16 miles from her birthplace, to establish what is now Tuskegee University in the very year that Miss Dee was born. Miss Dee is buried in the Tuskegee Cemetery, located near the University. The proximity in time of her birth to these significant events that have left cultural imprimaturs on history itself magnifies the awesome significance of the story of her life and works that I am about to tell.
During the period of time that preceded Miss Dee’s birth, especially before the Civil War, Alabama was known as part of the Southwest, and with passage of time the Old Southwest. The raucous, turbulent nature of those pioneering pre-Civil War times in Alabama were described in Flush Time in Alabama and Mississippi, by Joseph Glover Baldwin, first published in 1853. His writings were humorous, and he rivaled Mark Twain in popularity at the time. All of the adults who surrounded Miss Dee at the time of her birth were a part of that tumultuous time: a time that is now largely forgotten. That is the world that shaped mindsets in her natal surroundings. But her life and works also shows that there was also, very obviously, gentility.
An article in 1960 in Montgomery’s Alabama Journal by Katharine Tyson, that I found in the box containing Miss Dee’s stuff, appears to be based on a personal interview. It indicates that Miss Dee was proud to be a Southerner:
Mrs. DeBardeleben says she is a child of the old south. Not one ancestor whose lineage she has been able to trace ever lived north of the Mason-Dixon line.
The 1960 Tyson Alabama Journal article further states:
“Miss De Bardeleben was raised by her grandmother. The family lived in the village of La Place, now Shorter, 15 miles from Tuskegee.”
The DeBardeleben’s were among the first white settlers of Macon County. Miss Dee’s great grandfather, William Arthur Debardeleben was buried in the LaPlace Cemetery in 1838—in close proximity to the time that native Americans were being removed from Macon County by the Federal Government. He had been born in the Orangeburg District of South Carolina in 1802, and died in Macon County at the young age of 36.
Elizabeth Oldfield Haden, the grandmother who helped raise Miss Dee, must have been a very strong woman. Her husband died in 1877—six years before the death of Miss Dee’s mother. The grandmother raised at least 10 children of her own, and some of them were still minors when her daughter, Sarah, Miss Dee’s mother, died. The Haden’s lived on what Miss Dee sometimes called a plantation on the Old Federal Road in a community then called La Place. Her father’s family also owned a plantation in the Blackbelt portion of Macon County in a community called Cotton Valley.
The place where Miss Dee was born, as the crow flies, was within a couple of miles of the spot where I was born. I should make it clear that I was not born on a plantation. I was born on the north side of Calebee Swamp, and by road is probably three miles from where she was born on the south side of the swamp.
But back to the Haden plantation. The house where Miss Dee was born has been gone for a long time. The place is no longer called the Haden plantation. But old names tend to linger. Haden Hill, is on the far side of Calebee Swamp from the place where I was born, was included in the Haden plantation. It is a hill that rises from the alluvial plane of Calebee swamp, on the road that leads through Calebee swamp from the old Milstead community where I was born to the La Place community where Miss Dee was born. The hill still bears the Haden name. I remember riding a wagon load of cotton pulled by mules to a cotton gin in what used to be the La Place community with my Daddy on that road that was still a clay gravel road when I was very small.
The Haden’s were Baptists. They are buried in the La Place Baptist Church Cemetery. Interestingly, internet sources list Sweet Gum Cemetery as the burial place. That is probably because the cemetery has a Black section and a white section, and nearby Sweet Gum Church often uses the Black section for burial of its members. But the cemetery began as the cemetery for the LaPlace Baptist Church, a white church. The LaPlace Baptist Church was gone long before I was born. Miss Dee attended the La Place Baptist Church with her Grandmother as a small girl, but Miss Dee’s father was a Methodist preacher, and she joined the Methodist Church at age 11: just after her father died. There have been no white interments in the cemetery in many, many years.
There was a one room school at La Place, that was located near the La Place Methodist Church, and it is possible, but not entirely clear that Miss Dee attended that school as a child. I am not clear about when the school came into being. It merged into the Shorter School in 1920. Miss Dee would have been 39 years old in 1920. After graduating from the University of Alabama and the Teachers College at Columbia University, the Tyson article seems to indicate that Miss Dee taught at that one room school.
I hope to learn more about Miss Dee’s childhood, and if so, I will expand this post. But from what I have discovered, it is clear that her childhood was challenging, and as we will see, she accepted the challenge, and lived her lifetime responding to challenges.
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