Archival ResourcesDuffee, Mary Gordon
Manuscripts, circa mid-1880s, 1920
Biography:
Mary
Gordon Duffee's father, Matthew Duffee was born in Ireland and immigrated to
Tuscaloosa,
Alabama in 1823. In Tuscaloosa he operated a popular tavern, and he later bought
a resort hotel at Blount
Springs. Mary Duffee was born in Alabama in 1840 and spent many summers with her
family at the resort.
It was the journey to and from Blount Springs that inspired Duffee's best-known
work, Sketches of Alabama,
which originally appeared as fifty-nine articles in the Birmingham Weekly
Iron Age in 1886 and 1887.
Duffee's Sketches
earned her a reputation as a local historian, and she was invited to deliver
the
address of welcome to the visiting New York Press Association to Alabama in
1873. She also contributed
articles to several out-of-state newspapers, wrote guide books, advertising
copy, and poetry. In 1874, during
the cholera epidemic in Birmingham, Duffee returned to Blount Springs where her
family had been living since
the destruction of their hotel by fire in 1869. She remained there, on Duffee's
Mountain, until her death in 1920.
In her old
age Duffee seldom left her home and was known as an eccentric.
Source:
Duffee,
Mary Gordon. Sketches of Alabama. Introduction and notes by Virginia
Pounds Brown and Jane Porter Nabers. University, AL: University of Alabama Press,
1970.
Scope and Content:
The first
eleven files of this collection hold typescripts of some of Mary Gordon Duffee's
Iron Age
columns "Sketches of Alabama" (numbers 46 through 59, incomplete).
The remaining part of the collection
contains manuscripts of seven of Duffee's poems, a typed biographical sketch of
Duffee, undated, and Duffee's
obituary from the Birmingham Age-Herald.
Guide to Collection:
File level
guide available in the Archives Department.
Subject Areas:
Authors --
Alabama.
Duffee, Mary
Gordon, 1844-1920.
Jefferson
County (Ala.) -- Description and travel.
Travel.
Collection Number: 657
Size: ¼ linear foot (1 box)
Restrictions: Standard preservation and copyright restrictions.
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