Court Square, Where Commerce and Cruelty Shared an Address

The fountain standing in Court Square today is cast iron and gently functional, installed in eighteen eighty-five over an artesian well. It replaced nothing. The well was already there. What surrounded it before the fountain was something else entirely.

In the decades before the Civil War, this intersection, then called the Artesian Basin, was the main public auction ground for Montgomery. Land changed hands here. Livestock changed hands here. And enslaved people were sold here, marched up Commerce Street from the docks below, where steamboats had delivered them in chains from New Orleans and Mobile.

Montgomery occupied a horseshoe bend in the Alabama River, and that geography mattered. After Congress banned the international slave trade in eighteen oh eight, a domestic trade filled the gap. Slave traders bought people in the upper South, in Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas, and moved them by steamboat and rail to the cotton-hungry Deep South. By the eighteen forties, Montgomery had become Alabama's principal slave market. In eighteen fifty-nine, the city supported seven slave auctioneers and four slave depots, warehouses where people were held until their auction date.

The Equal Justice Initiative estimates that more than one hundred thousand enslaved people passed through Montgomery's local markets in the decades before the war. Alabama's enslaved population grew from about forty thousand at statehood in eighteen nineteen to more than four hundred thirty-five thousand by eighteen sixty. The math of that increase is inseparable from the Alabama River, the auction block, and this intersection.

Twenty years after the war ended, the city installed a fountain. The artesian water it draws today flows from the same underground source that kept the depot warehouses supplied.

The fountain has been here for one hundred forty years. The history is longer.