Pope's Tavern Museum
Pope's Tavern Museum, located in downtown Florence, Lauderdale County, is a local history center interpreting nineteenth-century domestic life, slavery, Civil War history, and medicine in the northwest Alabama area, in addition to hosting an active public archaeology program. Previously a privately owned residence and a boardinghouse, the museum has been owned and operated by the city of Florence since 1965.
The earliest written evidence for a structure on the site is from an 1845 deed conveyance. Some years later, a boarding house was constructed on the site, a few yards from the residence. The boarding house may have been built to provide temporary housing for students and professors at what is now the University of North Alabama (established two blocks away from Pope’s Tavern in 1855). The residence and the boarding house were eventually incorporated into one much larger structure contained under one roof. This likely happened in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The building passed through a number of owners in the years leading up to the Civil War, including physician William C. Cross, merchant J. C. Gookin, and Robert Patton, who served as governor of Alabama from 1865 to 1867. There were no significant battles in Florence during the Civil War, but there were massive troop movements through the city, as well as numerous small skirmishes. Larger battles occurred nearby, resulting in significant numbers of sick and wounded soldiers. Both the United States and the Confederacy used local buildings as hospitals. It is possible the building now known as Pope’s Tavern, and other structures throughout the city, were used as hospitals and recovery spaces for wounded and sick soldiers during the Civil War. But because there is no surviving documentation, much of the building’s actual history during the war is unclear.
After the war ended in 1865, local attorney Josiah Patterson purchased the home. In 1872, the house became the property of Edward M. Irvine and two years later Felix Grundy Lambeth purchased the building. He served as a clerk in both the Lauderdale County probate judge's office and the post office and eventually became postmaster general. While in possession of the Lambeth family, the building caught fire multiple times and was renovated in the 1890s. The house remained in the Lambeth family until 1965, when the Florence Chamber of Commerce purchased it and donated it to the city; the Florence Chamber of Commerce named its campaign to raise the funds to purchase the building the "Lambeth Fund." After renovations finished in 1968, the city opened the home as a museum, naming the repurposed structure Pope's Tavern (after attorney and Huntsville co-founder LeRoy Pope), though no evidence suggests that the building ever went by this name historically. The site underwent additional structural rehabilitation work in 1988 and 2014-15.
As new primary source materials and archaeological evidence have emerged, historical understanding of the site has shifted and expanded dramatically in recent years. The name Pope’s Tavern, which first appeared in print in the early 1960s, most likely stemmed from a misinterpretation of available source material. According to an unsubstantiated local legend, the museum's site on Hermitage Drive was a stopping point for travelers stretching back to Alabama's territorial period. Tradition held that Christopher Cheatham built the first structure there as an inn and stagecoach stop sometime in the 1810s at the request of political leaders LeRoy Pope and Thomas Bibb, who would become the state's second governor. But modern historians are unable to verify that the site ever served as an inn or tavern, or that Cheatham had any involvement with the site.
Today, Pope's Tavern is part of Florence Arts and Museums, a municipal department that also includes the Florence Mound and Museum, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Rosenbaum House Museum, and the Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts. Pope's Tavern's exhibits teach visitors about a range of subjects, including domestic life in Florence in the antebellum period and the city's role in the Civil War. The original collection began as the Susan K. Vaughn Museum, which was located on the ground floor of Rogers Hall on the campus of the University of North Alabama until it was brought to Pope’s Tavern in 1968. The museum also has a collection of nineteenth-century clothing and furniture, as well as Civil War uniforms and weapons.
Other objects and images tell the history of Forks of Cypress, the home of one of Florence's founders, James Jackson. Struck by lightning in 1966, the mansion burned almost completely. Today, only its brick Ionic columns, from a colonnade that wrapped around the entire home, remain. The exhibit tells the story of Forks of Cypress through the lens of the enslaved people who built it and whose labor generated the wealth to purchase some of the items in the collection. A rare portrait of an enslaved man, Parson Dick, is one of the museum’s most important items from the Forks of Cypress.
In 2021, a team of archaeologists led by the Office of Archaeological Research at the University of Alabama and funded by the Alabama Historical Commission, conducted the first academic archaeological excavation on the site, which led to the creation of an ongoing public archaeology program at Pope’s Tavern. Since 2021, excavations and archaeological programming seek to provide greater evidence about the history of the site, as well as model ethical archaeological practices for the community. Museum staff and community partners conduct excavations, clean and process artifacts, and catalog all the items identified at the site. The museum hosts an archaeology camp for students the first week in June of each year and a public archaeology day on the first Saturday of June. Digital images of some of the archaeological findings are available on the website for Florence Arts and Museums.
Also in 2021, the museum opened its "Slavery in the Shoals" exhibit, which focuses on first-hand accounts of slavery in the region. The first such exhibit in north Alabama, it was created with community input to build public support and features first-person accounts of life during slavery collected by the federal Works Progress Administration, Census information, newspaper accounts, and narratives written by enslaved people to create the exhibit. Located in an adjacent structure onsite, the exhibit's centerpiece is a textile art map commissioned from artist and architect Valerie S. Goodwin, whose ancestors had been enslaved in nearby Tuscumbia. The exhibit received the American Association of State and Local History's Award of Excellence in 2022. The building housing the exhibit was constructed in 1938 as a radio and television repair shop.
