Reviewed by: Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making by G. Ward Hubbs Alston Fitts III Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making. By G. Ward Hubbs. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. Xi, 204 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5944-7. G. Ward Hubbs has written a richly entertaining history of the city of Tuscaloosa. The “Druid City” (so called because of its many oaks) has known some dramatic moments during its two centuries of existence, and Hubbs tries to do justice to them all. Tuscaloosa was burned by Yankee troops on April 4, 1865, and largely devastated by a tornado on April 27, 2011. In between these two April disasters, the city attracted national attention with the University of Alabama’s football triumphs during the 1930s, with a triple lynching in 1933, and with attempts to integrate the University of Alabama in 1956 and 1963. Hubbs recounts the history with an emphasis on the builders and architects, not the political leaders. Tuscaloosa was a frontier village when it was made the capital of the state in 1825. Pigs roamed the streets and one even had her litter under the Presbyterian minister’s pulpit. Then William Nichols, whom Hubbs considers the best architect of the period, set to work designing classic buildings for the University of Alabama, the Alabama Legislature, and the Episcopal Church. By the time Nichols left Tuscaloosa in 1833, he had succeeded in transforming a frontier village into “one of the South’s great showplaces” (24). Unfortunately, not much of his work has survived. Most of the classic buildings he designed for the University were [End Page 284] destroyed by Union troops in 1865. The statehouse was converted into a women’s college and went up in flames in 1923. Christ Church Episcopal remains as a lone witness to Nichols’s architectural genius. Institutions of higher education have been an integral part of Tuscaloosa’s story. White students had been able to attend college at the University of Alabama since 1831; black students had to wait until 1876, when the Presbyterians set up Tuscaloosa Theological Institute to train black ministers. In 1895, the school changed its name to Stillman Institute and added an academic program. Montgomery took over as state capital in 1846, and Tuscaloosa began looking for a suitable industry to replace the population it lost. The town’s boosters had their hopes raised again and again in the decades that followed, provoking amused asides by Hubbs. When a Tuscaloosa newspaper editor proclaimed that the city “was in sight of the promised land,” Hubbs writes, “Surely (the editor) was using binoculars” (77). When the boosters rejoiced in 1884 that making the Black Warrior River more navigable meant that the city was about to enter a new era, Hubbs recalls that they were saying the same thing in 1874. Hubbs traces the evolution of downtown Tuscaloosa by focusing on three buildings. The seven-story Alston building, Tuscaloosa’s first “skyscraper,” was erected in 1909. The eight-story Merchants Bank and Trust, which combined a conventional exterior with its avant-garde interior, went up in 1925. It was designed by D. O. Whillbin, then Alabama’s top architect, who went on in 1937 to create a building that would house both the Bama Theater and the Tuscaloosa County Court House; it was the first air-conditioned building in town. Tuscaloosa underwent what Hubbs calls “a revolution in values” during the 1960s (161). While its first attempt to integrate the university ended in chaos, the second (which included Governor George Wallace’s famous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”) was choreographed in advance and ended in success. Black and white Tuscaloosans worked out better relations in education, politics, and daily life during the decade that followed. [End Page 285] Hubbs closes his narrative with a triple climax. First, the city finally achieved its dream of becoming an industrial center after its selection by Mercedes Benz in 1994 as the site for the German automaker’s first American plant. Alabama Governor Jim Folsom, Jr., asked, “Is this (selection) as good as a national football championship?” He then answered, “I think it’s better!” (159). Second, when a 2011 tornado destroyed...