In 1864, Wallace Turnage, a seventeen year old slave was owned by a merchant, Collier Minge, whose house stood on this site. Turnage escaped wartime Mobile by walking 25 miles down the western shore of Mobile Bay. After surviving three weeks in the Fowl River estuary, he paddled a row boat into the Bay. In late August, 1864, he was take to Fort Gaines and freed. Turnage's heroic emancipation was one of the most dramatic for African Americans in the Civil War. He later lived in New York City where he wrote his rare narrative, discovered in 2003 and published in 2007 in the book, A Slave No More . Through bravery and determination on this, his fifth attempt to escape, Turnage seized his own freedom.
Comments 0 comments