Retired Mobile Councilman Fred Richardson found himself in good company Wednesday, metaphysically speaking: Tricentennial Park – featuring a lake named after the Rev. Joseph Day and a walking trail named for pioneering councilwoman Irmatean Watson, was officially christened as Frederick D. Richardson Jr. Tricentennial Park.

“They were great people,” Richardson said of Day, who died in 2014, and Watson, who died in 2022.

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Mayor Sandy Stimpson, Richardson’s District 1 successor Cory Penn and other dignitaries, the former councilman laid out the history of the park.

Massive floods in 1980 and 1981 wiped out hundreds of homes along Three Mile Creek. “My house was taken out,” Richardson said. The disasters led to the city buying up condemned property and the Corps of Engineers implementing flood-control measures. At one point, the Corps planned to do away with the spring-fed lake on the north side of the creek east of Stanton Road, routing the creek channel through the lake site. According to archival Press-Register accounts, Day was among those who physically blocked bulldozers during protests in 1991. The city council voted to preserve the lake, which later was named for Day.

Watson, one of the state’s first Black pharmacists, became Mobile’s first Black councilwoman when the city switched to its current mayor-council government in 1985 and served until 1993. She too had been an advocate of the park, and so the trail around Day Lake was named for her.

Richardson was appointed by Mayor Mike Dow in 1997 and won an election later that year, serving until 2021. He said that when the city began developing plans to celebrate the tricentennial of its founding in 2002, Dow challenged his Tricentennial Planning Committee “to create something that would define this moment.”

Richardson said Wednesday that he seized upon the idea and aimed to create that something within District 1. The area around the lake had basically been allowed to grow wild, he said, but he saw the potential for a park there. Dow and the council approved it, and the rest is history – literally.

“I challenge you to find any other landmark in the city that defines this moment,” he said, meaning the tricentennial. It was the subject of yearlong festivities in 2002, but most of those events left little trace.

“People ride by and they don’t have a clue what ‘tricentennial’ means,” Richardson said. “I want a no-doubt moment. Right here. Because people don’t know. I want a no-doubt moment. So I’m going to challenge my mayor and my city council to create this no-doubt moment. And I’m going to give you my vision for this no-doubt movement.”

Richardson said he’d like the stretch of land along Stanton Road between the creek and the park entrance to feature a series of flags representing the six nations that had laid claim to Mobile – France, Great Britain, Spain, the Republic of Alabama, the Confederacy and the United States – plus one representing the Native Americans who preceded all those claims.

The city has gone through some contentious discussions of flag symbolism. In 2005 the city dropped the Confederate battle flag in favor of the Confederacy’s third national flag, and in 2015 the council took all flags except the United States one off the city seal. Stimpson did not sound like someone eager to plunge into another such brouhaha. “We’ll certainly think about that, if it’s possible to do that in today’s times,” he said.

But Stimpson didn’t hesitate to sing praises of Richardson as an active, engaged representative for District 1 during his long tenure on the council. He even quoted one of Richardson’s familiar slogans: “You ring, I spring.”

“And he meant it,” Stimpson said. “He was sincere about it. Truly there was no issue too small nor too big for him to take on.”

The mayor said that he and Richardson had butted heads on occasion, but he had no doubts about Richardson’s sincerity. “At the end of the day what I knew was that Fred in his heart thought he was doing what was right for those citizens in District 1 that he was representing,” Stimpson said.

“Tricentennial Park would not exist if it were not for Fred’s vision to get this done,” Stimpson said. “And it absolutely transformed this area, so for that we will be forever grateful.”

Richardson, for his part, thanked Stimpson for the renaming of the park, saying he knew it never would have happened without the mayor’s support. “The reason that this sign is here is because Mayor Stimpson said ‘yes,’” he said.

The park also is the site of the first stretch of a greenway that will one day provide a path from downtown to the area around Langan Municipal Park. Stimpson said progress on that project had “taken much longer than what we anticipated,” but news was coming. Later Wednesday, the city announced a Thursday groundbreaking for the next piece of the greenway, to the west of the park.

READ: ‘It’s bigger than man:’ Looking back at Mobile’s flood of 1981