The University, the Fire, and the Gorgases

The University of Alabama was chartered in eighteen twenty and opened to students in eighteen thirty-one, making it the oldest public university in the state. The campus sits on roughly two thousand acres in the heart of Tuscaloosa, a city that grew up partly because the university was there. For the first three decades, students and faculty occupied a cluster of Federal-style brick buildings on a shaded quad.

Then came the spring of eighteen sixty-five. In April of that year, Union cavalry under General John Croxton rode into Tuscaloosa and burned most of the university campus. They spared one building, the Gorgas House, the home of the university's steward.

The rest, including the library and most of the academic buildings, was reduced to rubble. The university did not reopen until eighteen seventy-one, six years after the war ended. When it did, it found itself in a city still struggling to absorb the economic shock of the capital's departure and the war's destruction.

The Gorgas family woven into that history was remarkable even by the standards of the era. Josiah Gorgas, the Confederate Army's chief of ordnance who had kept Southern armies supplied through the entire war, became the eighth president of the University of Alabama in eighteen seventy-eight. He died in Tuscaloosa in eighteen eighty-three.

His son, William Crawford Gorgas, born in Alabama in eighteen fifty-four, would become the Army Surgeon General and the man most responsible for controlling yellow fever and malaria during the construction of the Panama Canal. William Gorgas is considered one of the key reasons the canal was built at all. The one building the Union cavalry spared still stands on the Tuscaloosa campus, older than almost everything around it, a low brick structure from eighteen twenty-nine that has outlasted wars, fires, and nearly two centuries of Alabama weather.