Long before the human race began its love affair with asphalt, it clustered around more watery paths.
Villages and towns sprang from the banks of rivers and springs. Farms found fertile homes in the floodplains.
Where there was plentiful water, there were people.
The landscape of the Choccolocco Creek watershed several hundred years ago swarmed with human activity. Clusters of at least 100 small villages, cornfields and trading and fishing spots dotted the creek banks.
Choccolocco was geographically isolated from the urban growth of Anniston and Oxford for a century. Now, we have a different scenario: The floodplain and even the creek banks are ground zero for suburban development, new highways and business. A golf course, new homes and roads are springing up where ancient villages stood.
Family farms are fast disappearing from the landscape. "Something is being changed here," says David Umling, a planner for the East Alabama Regional Development and Planning Commission.
The shifts are economic and cultural. For example, while planners like Umling worry about sprawl, archeologists scramble to gather descriptive details of the Indian and settler life in the watershed.
"We live in the real world. We realize that Alabama has got to develop," said Dr. Tom Mayer, state archeologist. "What we want is to gather as much of this information, ahead of time, as we can."
The historic record of the Choccolocco Valley resembles a worn-down quilt with colorful patches and a few gaping holes. Local historians complain that many official records were destroyed during the Civil War and Calhoun County courthouse fires. Landowners tell stories of illegal digging for Indian artifacts on their properties.
A physical description of the valley from a settler in the early 1830s reads: "Cockle burrs grow high as a man's head and a man needs to ride a horse to pull the corn. Slender canes much taller than man outline the creek banks."
The valley itself is part of an intense debate about the travels of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto.
Dr. Harry Holstein, an archeologist at Jacksonville State University, believes that DeSoto and other Spanish explorers took a shortcut south through the Choccolocco Valley upon leaving the Indian town of Coosa, believed to be in northern Alabama or Georgia. Sixteenth-century iron artifacts have been discovered at Nances Creek, near the northern entrance to the valley, Holstein said.
He is convinced that a Native American complex excavated near Boiling Spring is the village Ulibahali, cited at least five times by Spanish explorers who traveled in the Coosa region in 1540 and 1560. DeSoto or no DeSoto, the Boiling Springs area - the site of a new Interstate 20 interchange - is also one of the best archeological finds in Calhoun County. At least 20 Native American villages were located here.
But archeologists like Holstein need a welcome mat in order to explore.
Unfortunately, the most exciting portion of a recent dig in Boiling Springs - which featured a flat-top temple mound and more than a dozen surrounding village structures - already is partially destroyed. The 30-foot mound was bulldozed in the 1950s for agricultural fields. Now, it's only seven feet high and "smeared all over the place" in a sod field, Holstein said.
During a survey for the Alabama Department of Transportation, which is building the Eastern Parkway near Boiling Springs, Holstein was able to excavate a portion of the mound and other nearby "high spots" where Native Americans had erected their homes.
But a landowner bulldozed the right-of-way in June, destroying the site, Holstein said. "It's kind of a sad story."
Unless landowners approve a dig, the only way archeologists can get access to a site is a federal project - like the Eastern Parkway - which requires archeology surveys. "But if it doesn't involve federal funds, I don't have anything other than a soap box to stand on," Dr. Mayer said.
In the case of the parkway, Holstein and other archeologists were able to investigate a small portion of the Boiling Springs complex. Much of the rest of the site is on sod fields.
Sod farms entered Calhoun County about 15 years ago. Today, roads, restaurants and sod farms occupy much of the Boiling Springs area.
A construction project will permanently erase the chance for archeological study. On the other hand, by the nature of their operation, the sod farms in the flood plains are "peeling off history and sending it away," Holstein said.
Holstein estimates that at least a foot of dirt has been removed from the fields since he began excavation work in the Boiling Springs area in the 1980s.
Suburban sprawl
As this article was being reported, workers were raising the wood skeletons of new houses against the backdrop of fluffed-out cotton fields in Choccolocco Valley.
It seems the valley is once again bursting - this time with suburban sprawl.
"It is growing. It ain't going to be this way long," said Demarest Teague, an elderly lady who grew up tilling fields on a Choccolocco farm and likes to drive around with her husband on Sunday afternoons, admiring the expensive new homes.
"There aren't too many full-time farmers left," remarked Ed Land, a farmer who runs a 400-acre farm near Iron City.
Natives of the valley seem to have little hostility for their new neighbors, but they bemoan the gradual loss of their picturesque cotton fields. Historical records seem to indicate that the Native Americans, even when they were swindled by 19th-century land speculators, gave up their Choccolocco land in a stoic manner.
Today, the Choccolocco farmer's enemy is the combined forces of rising land and equipment prices and sliding corn, soybean and cotton prices.
It's become harder than ever to make a profit in the valley, but some farmers still refuse to sell.
The Anderson family, for example, has farmed in the Friendship community since 1881. But third-generation farmer Jack Anderson now raises his cows in the shadow of subdivisions.
Not long ago, the Anderson cows birthed a new generation of calves. Anderson cringed as the newborn calves' plaintive moans rang through the Friendship community all night long. He expected his phone to ring with irate, sleepless neighbors on the other end.
He said he was relieved and grateful that his suburban neighbors, so far, have been tolerant of his operation.
Anderson, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, doesn't make a profit on his farm, but he doesn't want to give up and sell out.
He said he can understand why others do. For an elderly farmer who can no longer work the land and doesn't have huge savings, it is difficult to rationalize letting the valuable land sit while he continues to pay taxes on it.
"On one hand, I hate to see all that farm land developing (into subdivisions). On the other hand, I see an old farmer on Social Security with a huge asset out there," Anderson said.
The planning commission's Umling is passionate on the subject of converted farmland. Armed with statistics on sprawl, population and declining farmland, he'd like to find ways to help east Alabama farmers compete in the modern marketplace.
Two ways, perhaps, are to ease the tax burdens or create strategies to promote locally grown crops, Umling said.
Silver Run farmer Melvin Watts has high hopes for his cows and his newest crop - Bermuda grass. "I started planting this new sort of grass. I planted it all up and down Choccolocco. It produces a good, high-quality hay," he enthused.
The new crop is a replacement for his old row crops of soybean or corn. Last year was the first year in decades that he planted neither.
He said he hopes his land will remain productive and protected.
"I am a big lover of the land and preserving the land," Watts said.
Memories of Choccolocco
The people of the Choccolocco watershed still tell Native American legends, and they fondly remember days when they themselves fished, took church picnics, learned to swim, and drank from Choccolocco Creek.
Until the early 1830s, the Creek Indians controlled the Choccolocco Valley and other parts of eastern and central Alabama. White explorers and Indian agents referred to an Indian settlement called "Chocke Clucca" and "Chow-Ke-Thlucco." There is no absolute proof, but most historians agree that "Choccolocco" came from the Creek words, "chahko," meaning "shoals," and "lago," meaning "big."
As local historian Calvin Wingo notes, in his History of Choccolocco Valley, the creek is a wide, shallow stream with "big shoals."
Beginning when the Native Americans sold their land in 1832 and when they were sent packing for good in 1836, settlers from the Blue Ridge states moved to the valley, hoping to make their fortunes from cotton and other crops.
Later, when more fertile plains were discovered in Alabama's Black Belt, many of the wealthiest families left the Choccolocco Valley. Others remained to work on and run small plantations. Eventually, their small communities were eclipsed by industrial growth in Anniston and Oxford. However, food crops and mills along the creek, as well as brickyards and iron pits, helped sustain the economy of the entire area.
Nobody got wealthy, and certainly didn't attain the prosperity of pre-Civil War Black Belt plantation owners.
The valley residents' comfortable distance from the rest of Calhoun County, in some ways, has helped them remain anchored to their past.
"We used to gather wild ferns from the banks, and then we'd plant them in the yard," says Georgia Calhoun, a Choccolocco native and town historian, reminiscing about her youth.
"We'd go down there to do our laundry," said Mrs. Teague. Her family grew cotton, corn and vegetables on the banks of Choccolocco. "We would take water from the creek and dump it on our land."
All of that is impossible, now. While much of the creek is still idyllic and beautiful, most would shudder to drink from water that is subject to agricultural runoff and illegal dumping of dead animals, tires and other refuse. While the threat is perhaps slight, many residents fear the upper creek is impacted from industrial pollution, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, which have polluted Choccolocco for 30 years.
"I'd like to see it cleaned up," Mrs. Calhoun said.
Also, because of the conversion to pasture land and concerns about vandalism, large stretches of the creek are now inaccessible except by shallow boat.
"A long time ago, those creeks were clean and you could drink out of all of them," recalls Bill Busby, a slender, aging man who grew up in the valley. "You could fish any kind of fish you liked - carp, bass, brim, suckers."
Fueling his antique pickup on Choccolocco Road on a recent sunny afternoon, Busby explained, "People quit tending the sides of the creek. Landowners got their land posted because people started killing their cows and calves."
The shaded, log-strewn miles of the creek running south of the town of Choccolocco still swarm with the fish of Busby's memories.
But the surrounding scenery is changing at a rapid pace. The upper and lower portions of the valley have been impacted by a new influx of business, suburban homes, and, on weekends, rambunctious teen-agers with cars.
"I'm for development, but I sure don't like to see the cotton fields and forests go," Mrs. Calhoun said, wistfully.
"There is a reason for this place being peaceful."
