Dixey Bar Illegitimate No More?
By Chip Drago
Mobile Bay Times
Dixey Bar has been a bastard too long.
A local attorney and amateur historian believes the time has come to do right by an historical landmark -- give Dixey Bar its due, its heritage. Call it by its name, Dixey Bar. Spell it right. And make it legal.
The sandbar at southeast side of the mouth of Mobile Bay has been called Dixey Bar for probably more than 100 years, but not officially.
David A. Bagwell, a lawyer in Fairhope, has appealed to Roger L. Payne, the executive secretary of the U.S. Geological Survey's U.S. Board on Geographical Names.
"Even though the bar is and has been for maybe a century called "Dixey Bar" by people in boats and ships going anywhere near it, for some reason -- likely because nobody has ever taken the trouble to write a letter like this -- the bar has never been officially named," Bagwell wrote to Payne last month.
The reaction, if any, will almost certainly not be opposition, but will more likely be surprise that Dixey Bar is not already officially Dixey Bar before God, government and mariners, Bagwell suggested.
Running south from Fort Morgan on the east side of the mouth of Mobile Bay into the Gulf of Mexico, the sandbar got its name not from "Look Away! Look Away! Look Away! Dixie Land" fame, but from an ill-fated clipper ship, Bagwell informs Payne.
The clipper ship Robert H. Dixey earned everlasting local note when it collided with its fate and a hurricane on Sept. 15, 1860. Nineteen lives were lost and the ship was destroyed on the bar that came to claim its wreckage and its name.
The story is fully told in a book by L. Tracy Girdler entitled "An Antebellum Life at Sea," published in 1997 by the Black Belt Press in Montgomery, Ala.
Built in East Boston in 1854-55, the ship was 165-feet on the water line (40-60 feet shorter, and thus slower, than the big clippers of the time), and double-topsail rigged. She was framed with sawn live oak and planked with yellow pine.
According to Bagwell, the original owners of the clipper were Robert H. Dixey of New York City, Dixey's lifelong friend Thomas J. Fettyplace of Marblehead, Mass. and Mobile, shipbuilder Paul Curtis, Nicholas Harleston Broun of Boston and Mobile, Daniel and George Deshon of Boston and Mobile, and Edward Bergoren DeMeaux of New Orleans.
In a footnote, Bagwell adds that Broun's close relative, Thomas L. Broun, sold the horse "Traveler" to Robert E. Lee in February of 1862.
The Robert H. Dixey had a glorious run before settling for and to the sandbar that gives it its legacy. Between 1855 and 1860, she sailed the world, as far as St. Petersburg in the far Eastern end of the Baltic Sea, only to meet her end on Sept. 14-15, 1860 in Mobile Bay.
As Bagwell describes it in his letter to Payne:
"On that last voyage she brought with her from New York a Mobile Bar Pilot named Capt. Samuel Smyly. He took her over the bar and into Mobile Bay just ahead of a hurricane on Friday night the 14th, drawing 17 feet 5 inches. Halfway up the bay the wind shifted to north-northwest and the pilot at 10 p.m. felt compelled to put out both anchors, with 45 and 50 fathoms of chain. She held until 10 a.m. Saturday, when the eye passed and the north winds came stronger and the smaller chain parted and the ship stranded in the bay. The men went to work cutting away masts and sails, with the ship taking water for an hour. The big chain parted and they knew there was no hope. All hands, 24 men, made for the the forecastle and lashed themselves to the ship. The ship bounced down the channel, drifting eastward outside the bay, until she hit the east bar -- what we now call "Dixey Bar" in her honor -- and broke to pieces. The pilot, the mate and four men escaped to land when the ship broke up, and were rescued by a boat from a nearby ship. The captain, Richard H. Dixey, age 51, stayed with 18 black seamen on the ship -- apparently free men -- and his last words to the pilot were "Goodbye, I hope we shall meet in heaven." All who stayed with the ship were lost. The seamen were buried in unmarked graves on Dauphin Island (on the west side of the mouth of Mobile Bay), and Capt. Dixey was buried in the then-new Magnolia Cemetery, where only a broken stone remains."
The story doesn't quite end there. A subsequent hurricane created an island, "Dixey Island," which lasted on the charts until another storm washed it away, leaving only Dixey Bar, beneath the water and unofficial.
"The John H. Dixey and Capt. Dixey deserve to be remembered -- and correctly spelt," Bagwell writes.
