History

Updated May 2026 The short version: The Cheese Cottage is one of Mobile’s most charming spots for cheese, wine, and one of the best patios in town. Owner Stephenie Funaro has built it into a local favorite, with cheeses sourced from around the world, wine and cheese pairing classes, and a beloved outdoor seating…

Updated May 2026 The short version: Mobile, Alabama has tours for every interest: food, history, African American heritage, haunted, ghost, nature, boat, kayak, and museum tours. The best food tour in Mobile is Bienville Bites Food Tour, ranked top five in America by USA Today. For African American heritage, the Dora Franklin Finley African…

Updated May 2026 The short version: In 1860, more than 50 years after the United States banned the international slave trade, the schooner Clotilda smuggled 110 captured Africans into Mobile, the last known slave ship to reach America. After emancipation, survivors built their own community just north of the city called Africatown. Joycelyn…

Updated May 2026 The short version: George Moore is a Mobile institution. He started washing pots for fourteen dollars a week, worked as a food runner at the Battle House Hotel during segregation (when that was one of the only jobs open to Black men there), and lived through Mobile’s entire twentieth-century transformation. When the restored Battle House reopened in 2007, they invited him back, and today the hotel’s gift shop bears his name. This is his story, and the story of the grand hotel he has watched over for most of his life. Some people know a city’s history because they studied it. George Moore knows Mobile’s history because he lived it. For more than half a century, his life and the life of the Battle House Hotel have been woven together, through the city’s booming postwar…

Updated May 2026 The short version: The most haunted hotels in Mobile, Alabama are the Battle House Renaissance Hotel and the Malaga Inn, along with the Admiral Semmes and the Fort Conde Inn. Guests at these historic hotels report flickering lights, swinging chandeliers, apparitions, and unexplained sounds. Each one lets you actually book a…

Updated May 2026 The short version: The Battle House is Mobile’s grand historic hotel, recently named the best historic hotel in America, and it’s also one of its most haunted. At least three spirits are said to walk its halls: a heartbroken bride in red, a vanishing man in grey, and a murdered guest…

Updated May 2026 The short version: Mobile’s most haunted historic homes include the Carnival Museum in the old Bernstein-Bush mansion, the Oakleigh House, and the Fort Conde Inn. These grand homes, many built during Mobile’s wealthy 1800s, have been turned into museums, inns, and attractions over the years, and nearly all of them come…

Updated May 2026 The short version: Mobile, Alabama is one of the most haunted cities in the South, with more than 300 years of history behind it. The most haunted places downtown include Barton Academy, the Battle House Hotel, the Church Street Graveyard, the Boyington Oak, the Carnival Museum, and the old Bucket…

Updated May 2026 The short version: The Pelican Girls were twenty-three young Frenchwomen, mostly teenagers from convents and orphanages, who sailed to Mobile, Alabama in 1704 to marry the colony’s settlers. They were promised paradise and given disease, hunger, and houses without doors. By 1706 they had launched the Petticoat Rebellion, refusing to live…

Updated May 2026 The short version: The Boyington Oak is a large oak tree growing near the Church Street Graveyard in downtown Mobile, tied to the city’s most famous ghost story. In 1834, a young man named Charles Boyington was hanged for the murder of his friend Nathaniel Frost, a crime he swore he…