While folks in New Orleans claim they started the tradition of Mardi Gras in the U.S., historians say French colonists began celebrating the festival not long after first spotting Mobile Bay in 1699. Two years later, a hearty group of French soldiers and Canadian hunters built a fort on the bluff and formed a colony in 1701, 27 miles away from the site of the current city, according to Jay Higginbotham in his seminal 1977 book “Old Mobile.” The book mentions brief Mardi Gras celebrations in February 1701 and 1702.

First Mardi Gras at Old Mobile

The first official celebration, a feast, was held on the traditional date in February in 1703.

“The merrymaking, of course, was nowhere near as elaborate as that which they had enjoyed in France. Dancing would not become part of the celebration until 1705,” Higginbotham wrote.

But at one point in its long history, Mobile’s Mardi Gras was held on New Year’s Eve – and that’s when parades and mystic societies began.

The site of Old Mobile was then part of French Louisiana and, later, the Louisiana Territory. Mobile was moved to its current site in 1711. It would come under British rule and then Spanish. In 1817, the Alabama Territory was formed and 1819 when Alabama became a state.

The site of the colony is now located on private property owned by a manufacturing company but there is a historic marker noting that first colony. Dr. Greg Waselkov at the University of South Alabama has led several archaeological digs at the area. Relics can be found on display at the university’s museum.

New Year’s Eve, 1830

Mobile’s place in the history of Mardi Gras, also called Carnival, would be solidified when a cotton broker named Michael Krafft unwittingly created the first mystic society and led the first Mardi Gras parade in this country. Such societies, now known as krewes, became popular in celebrations in Mobile and New Orleans. Mardi Gras begins on Jan. 6 and ends on Fat Tuesday, which stemmed from a French Catholic tradition and is based on the Easter season.

But Carnival was also a popular way to celebrate the coming of a new year. It was on New Year’s Eve 1830 when Michael Krafft started the tradition of parading. Krafft, born in Bristol, Penn., in 1807, moved to Mobile to sell cotton.

On Dec. 31, Krafft and friends Thomas Niles, Robert Roberts, Henry Dagget, Daniel Geary, Nathanial Ledyar, Richard Currie and Amual Kipp celebrated at Antoine La Tourrette’s restaurant, located in Southern Hotel in Mobile. As morning broke on the first day of 1831, the rowdy group staggered over the cobble-stoned streets of the port city of about 3,000 people. According to legend, writes Ann Pond in her book “Cowbellion,” the men passed a hardware store and spotted articles suspended outside the store to advertise its wares, as was tradition at the time. Versions vary as to whether Krafft deliberately or accidentally dislodged a rake, a hoe and cowbells from the display but they became part of the drunken parade and the men called themselves the Cowbellion de Rakin Society.

Pond wrote: “’Mysticism’ was new to the traditional street festivity and revelry was new to the practices of the Masons. But their combination was the reason the Cowbellions evolved into something much more significant than any of the other forms of holiday revelry known at the time.”

Krafft later moved to New Orleans and died in 1839. He is buried in Mobile’s historic Magnolia Cemetery. The headstone is often decorated with Mardi Gras beads.