An Alabama Port Authority railroad project that generated concern in Mobile’s Africatown community has passed a review by the Federal Railroad Authority, which says the work will not disrupt historic properties.

The FRA report removes a potential obstacle to the port’s Chickasaw Lead Line project, which will add a siding to an existing track. However, the research involved in the review did more clearly map Africatown historic sites that lie outside the existing Africatown Historic District. Among other things, researchers involved in identifying the wreckage of the slave ship Clotilda have confirmed the location of the shipyard where it was built.

The FRA says the report “constitutes a reasonable and good faith effort to identify historic properties” that might have been disrupted by the project, and that it found none. Anderson Flen, chairman of the board of the Africatown Historic Development Foundation, said he was just coming to grips with the report but was skeptical.

“I grew up in that area and I know the history of that area,” said Flen. He said that as he studies the report, he will be “trying to figure out how did you come to that conclusion.”

The Port’s Chickasaw Lead Line project has been the subject of discussion since August 2023. According to the Mobile Area Environmental Justice Action Coalition (MEJAC), that’s when the Africatown Historic Preservation Foundation learned of the project and shared the news with other community groups.

MEJAC, the foundation and other partners created a report on resident concerns that was presented to the FRA, the Port Authority and engineer firm Volkert Inc. at a preliminary meeting in November 2023. One outcome of that meeting was that “all parties agreed to further community engagement,” according to MEJAC. MEJAC later published its report under the title, “Key Concerns about the Port of Mobile’s Africatown Railyard Expansion Project.”

Community leaders then held a couple of at times contentious gatherings leading up to a “public involvement meeting” presented by the Federal Railroad Authority, the Port Authority and Volkert on February 29, 2024.

The plan calls for the Port Authority to build 1.9 miles of new track alongside an existing Terminal Railway Alabama State Docks (TASD) track. The new track would stretch northward from Three Mile Creek into the Plateau area; while it primarily passes through industrial territory, it does come close to residential areas in places.

The Port Authority said the new track would be used as a siding for short-term storage, improving the efficiency of a nearby switchyard along Telegraph Road south of Bay Bridge Road. The agenda for the February 2024 meeting contained a more detailed description:

“The purpose of the proposed Chickasaw Railroad Lead Line Project is to improve the efficiency of the TASD railroad system north of the TASD interchange yard. Under the existing conditions, only one track exists for much of the distance between the TASD interchange yard northward to Berg Spiral Pipe Road. When a train stops along this portion of the track, other trains are forced to stop on the mainline track. This condition results in congestion along the TASD mainline track, within the TASD yard, and on the nearby Alabama Gulf Coast Railway and Norfolk Southern Railroad tracks. In addition, under the existing conditions, the congestion leads to trains frequently idling for hours. The proposed project will allow trains up to 10,000- feet, or approximately 175 cars to be moved off the TASD mainline track to the new sidetrack while waiting for trains to pass. The new sidetrack will also reduce idle times.”

The new track would parallel the existing track on land that the Port Authority owns. Planners say the work also will involve temporary easements for grading and drainage work, as well as work on multiple road crossings and the removal of an unused pedestrian bridge that once served an industrial workforce. Funding has been secured through an $8.7 million federal appropriation.

Africatown residents and advocates, wary after a decades-long fight with industrial encroachment, voiced a variety of worries in the MEJAC report and in the community meetings. One was that the existing line was already close to residential neighborhoods at some points, and an additional line might mean more noise and more potential pollution for those residents. Some voiced concerns that the siding might eventually be extended to carry through traffic, or that engines might sit idling on the new track.

For the federal authorities, the particular focus of that February 2024 meeting was the requirement under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 to consider the project’s possible impacts on historic properties, what it calls a Section 106 Review.

An Africatown Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The project site does not touch that historic district. But it does come close at its southeast corner, where Chin Street turns north to meet Paper Mill Road, an area where heavy industry already sits close to homes, causing health concerns for residents. MEJAC’s report says the line comes within 160 feet of occupied residences.

It’s also close to residential blocks at the northeast corner of the historic district, where Jakes Lane meets McKinley Street and where Mobile County Training School serves as a community anchor. According to the MEJAC report, it’s a little over 300 feet from the school’s athletic field.

The FRA guide to the February 2024 meeting said that the process would consider possible sites of historic interest including hunting grounds, a baptismal site and a community gathering space.

At least one community leader came away disappointed with the session, which was designed to allow the Railroad Administration and the Port Authority to provide information on the project and to encourage people to submit written comments to the Railroad Administration’s process.

Joe Womack, executive director of the Africatown-CHESS community group, stated afterward that “Quite a number of Africatown supporters left disappointed because they had come to the meeting with a lot they wanted to say and was not given the opportunity to express themselves verbally.”

“I include myself as one of those people,” he said in his report on the meeting. “It’s unfortunate, but most residents will not take the time to write their opinions and questions down and turn them in later. They would rather express themselves at an open microphone rather than put something in writing. Africatown’s CHESS environmental organization will continue to collaborate with other local and national environmental organizations to push for more transparency within the community and more open community meetings.”

 “In addition, the project is very close to residential homes and Africatown’s Historic School within the historic district,” Womack wrote at the time. “Unfortunately for Africatown residents, The Africatown Historic District is only about 40% of where Africatown residents live and about 20% of the entire Africatown Planning Area.”

In its new report, “Supplemental Historic Property Identification to Support Section 106 Review of the Chickasaw Lead Line Project” the FRA indicates that the feedback it gathered in late 2023 and early 2024 led it to determine “that supplemental historical research was needed to properly assess effects from the Project to the Africatown Historic District.”

According to the report, the FRA conducted additional research of its own and the Port Authority hired an archaeological consulting firm: SEARCH Inc, a company instrumental in conclusively identifying the wreckage of the slave ship Clotilda.

A “technical memorandum” from SEARCH Inc. addresses “The Clotilda Shipbuilding Site and Surrounding Maritime Industrial Site and Their Relationship to Africatown.” The researchers involved include Marine Archaeologist James Delgado, Alexandra Jones and project manager Timothy Parsons.

Their research, going back to 18-century maps and documents, gives an account of a landscape that has been heavily changed by shifting industrial use over the last two centuries, the St. Louis Point area where Three Mile Creek and Chickasaw Creek meet the Mobile River. Accounting for the altered topography, they said they were able to precisely identify the location of features such as a sawmill, wharf and shipyard. These would have been known to the Clotilda survivors who settled Africatown, in part because they were owned by Timothy Meaher, the driving force behind the voyage that brought them into slavery, and his brother, Burns Meaher.

“Historic references not previously consulted by other scholars clearly note that the sawmill and shipyard co-existed,” says the report, “and with that, we can clearly assert that that site was a location where local Clotilda survivors settled prior to settling Africatown.”

The key question for the FRA, however, was whether the new project’s Area of Probable Effect would disturb any historic sites. Maps in the report show that while it’s close to a couple – a community garden site on the north side of the historic district and a baptismal site along Three Mile Creek – none of them are within its boundaries.e

Maggie Oliver, the Port Authority’s vice president for communication and federal affairs, said the FRA’s findings clear the way for engineering work to continue on the project. The start of construction is probably about a year away, she said.

“I actually grew up on the east side of the track,” said Flen. “I was actually born there, and I know some of the things that went on. I know some of the people and some of the things that happened there, so I really need to look at the document and then try to determine how they went about the process … I don’t know how they came to that conclusion.”

For the Africatown community and historians interested in it, the SEARCH Inc. report brings fresh precision to landmarks that would have been familiar to Clotilda survivors. It also concludes that “Meaher’s Hummock,” as an area of elevated ground near the mouth of the Chickasabogue was once known, could be a treasure trove of historical artifacts.

“We suggest further archaeological assessment take place at the now more closely defined ‘Meaher’s Hummock’ with probable prehistoric, historic, and maritime archaeological remains from the indigenous shell mounds, the sawmill, shipyard, and original settlement of the community before 1865,” says the SEARCH Inc. report.

Such research, it says, might “suggest a revision” to Africatown’s entry in the National Register of Historic Places. Such a review would not necessarily expand the historic district, it said, but would note the importance of “historically linked archaeological sites” such as the wreck of the Clotilda, the sawmill and shipyard.

Delgado said that, like the wreck of the Clotilda, the location of the Meaher sawmill and shipyard was never truly lost: The locations had been documented at the time, and the knowledge had been passed along within the community. But over time, as with the Clotilda, they had fallen into obscurity.

For example, he said, some had come to think that the Meaher sawmill and shipyard had been on Three Mile Creek. But old records, particularly tax records, deeds and some precise 19th-century geological surveys, left no doubt that they were a bit farther north, on Chickasaw Creek. Furthermore, the high ground they were built on was, at least partly, ancient shell mounds.

“There are these amazing resources,” said Delgado said the surveys. “But what most people don’t know is that the originals, that is the original surveys done by these guys starting in the 1840s … survive and are in the National Archives in a drawer that nobody ever opens.”

“I know those well because I was the director of Maritime Heritage for NOAA, and we’ve used those records before,” he said. “And those records are amazing because they include the notebooks these guys were carrying with them.”

With the help of archival experts John Cloud and Timothy Parsons, Delgado’s effort turned up a map from U.S. Coast Survey work in 1845-1848. The map and accompanying notes “precisely locate original shorelines, areas of swamp and marsh, the banks of the Mobile River and Chickasabogue (now Chickasaw) Creek, as well as the Meaher’s structures,” says the SEARCH report. Additionally, we found a detailed confidential description and assessment of the Meaher’s industrial properties on the site.”

For Delgado, it all adds up to a better understanding of the landscape that the founders of Africatown had to navigate. The hull of the Clotilda was built in a shipyard near the mouth of Chickasaw Creek, using timbers from an adjacent sawmill. Then it was towed down to Mobile to be rigged and outfitted, said Delgado, and when ready it returned to the sawmill for a load of lumber.

Its infamous final voyage ended nearby, when its captives were transferred to a steamer and the Clotilda itself was burned and scuttled. Delgado said its timbers still show the marks of the steam-powered saw that cut them.

Freed after the Civil War, some of the former Clotilda captives found work at the sawmill and even used wood from it as they built homes in nearby enclaves such as Lewis Quarters.

“There is nothing earth-shattering here,” said Delgado, emphasizing that “the community had a pretty good idea of where things were.”

 “But it does come back to the point of, going back to the original primary sources done at the time, we can say … we know exactly where that stuff was,” he said. “And there is the possibility that digging there, if it was done, might reveal something. But as to what has survived after all the subsequent development is unknown.”

“This is a community that’s proud of its history,” he said. If forensic archaeology and primary historical research can confirm that history, “that’s a good thing,” he said.

“This is a small contribution,” he said, “But I think it adds to our sense … of the larger landscape of Clotilda.”