The Tensaw River: Alabama’s Hidden Heritage Corridor 

By Mike Bunn 

Series: Alabama: The Forge of History 

University of Alabama Press, 2024 

Paper: $24.95 

Genre: Nonfiction, Natural History, History  

Reviewed by Bill Plott 

Cover of THE TENSAW RIVER. Cover shows an image on the banks on the Tensaw River in Alabama. Color field of blue, green, and brown.
Alabama: The Forge of History is a University of Alabama Press richly illustrated series of guidebooks to some of Alabama’s premier historical sites. Previous releases have featured such diverse topics as Moundville, Birmingham’s iron and steel industry, and Civil Rights heritage. Lavishly illustrated with more than 40 historical maps and photographs, Mike Bunn’s The Tensaw River: Alabama’s Hidden Heritage Corridor is a worthy addition to that series. Bunn, whose love of the region is evident, took many of the natural beauty images of the Tensaw himself. 

Bunn, director of Historic Blakely State Park and author of several other books on Gulf South history, including This Southern Metropolis: Life in Antebellum Mobile, has produced a “historical travelogue” that explores the wonders of the Tensaw River, with all its natural beauty, diversity, and history. He tells us that few places remain “as visually so close in appearance to what they once were as the Tensaw watershed.”  

The diversity of the 41-mile-long river is extraordinary. It is home to 184 types of fishes, more than 200 species of birds, including eagles and osprey, some 800 species of insects, countless reptiles, and more than 50 different mammals. It is home to “one of Alabama’s last truly wild places.” 

The flora is equally diverse. Notable among the vast array of trees and other plants is a one-time champion bald cypress just off Bayou Jessamine. The amazing tree has a trunk that measures 27 feet in diameter. It is estimated to be at least 300 years old.   

All of which contribute to the Tensaw’s role as an integral part of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, second only to the Mississippi Delta in size. It has been aptly called “America’s Amazon.”  

It is an area as rich in history as natural diversity. From prehistoric times, there is the discovery of Bottle Tree, an indigenous peoples mound complex largely unknown and lightly explored because of its difficult accessibility, even for archaeologists. The description generates a yearning to join one of Bunn’s tour groups to see the mounds firsthand. But perhaps the pristine nature of the site is not without merit. As he describes the entire Tensaw region, “The lack of accessibility only serves to make it more exotic, a place apart from our daily grind in the cookie cutter subdivisions and strip malls where we spend our time.” 

The region’s modern history is detailed from the early 1500s to modern times, covering commerce as well as battles. There is a remarkable aerial view of the Tensaw as anchorage for the “Ghost Fleet,” the National Defense Reserve Fleet that was warehoused on the river from 1947 into the early 1970s. Bunn has written not only an engaging history of the Tensaw River region but also what could be considered a beginning explorer’s guide to the extraordinarily diverse flora and fauna waiting to be admired and enjoyed. It’s the companion one would reference over and over again on such an outing. 

In addition to his position at Historic Blakely State Park in Spanish Fort, Bunn’s historical research has included work with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission, the Columbus, Georgia Museum, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s Museum of Mississippi, the Birmingham Historical Society, and the Tuscaloosa County Historical Society. 

 

Bill Plott is a retired journalist and author of The Negro Southern League, A Baseball History, 1920-1951 (McFarland, 2015), and Black Baseball’s Last Team Standing, The Birmingham Black Barons, 1919-1962 (McFarland, 2019). He lives in Montevallo.