Mobile, AL news and local guide

Cotton made antebellum Mobile a major port, and the city was also the destination of the last known slave ship to reach the Americas: in 1860 the Clotilda was abandoned near Mobile after landing captives from West Africa, whose survivors later founded the community of Africatown. During the Civil War, Admiral David Farragut's Union fleet broke through the Confederate defenses at the Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864, and after the fall of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakeley, Union troops occupied the city on April 12, 1865. On May 25, 1865, an explosion at an ammunition depot on the waterfront killed about 300 people and destroyed much of the city. Mobile claims the first Mardi Gras celebrations in North America, and Civil War veteran Joseph Stillwell Cain revived the festivities the year after the war ended. World War II transformed the city again: between 1940 and 1943 more than 89,000 people moved to Mobile to work in its shipyards, where Alabama Drydock built Liberty ships and Gulf Shipbuilding built freighters and destroyers, while Brookley Army Air Field expanded nearby. Sources Encyclopedia of Alabama: Mobile Wikipedia: History of Mobile, Alabama (citing Higginbotham, Old Mobile, and Thomason, Mobile: The New History of Alabama's First City) Wikipedia: Battle of Spanish Fort