Alan J. Pitts
Excellent responses!
Sat Jun 9 13:16:15 2001


I may be able to find the book Lloyd mentioned at the library, and was able to study all three maps resources that Hoyt named. The second is the same view shown in the Official Atlas, plate 149.

Comparing this map to the others, it appears that Day's Gap would be located about ten miles south of Cedar Plains (Morgan County), which still exists. The road south from Danville also exists, which helps identify Basham's Gap as Piney Grove and Salvado as Addison, both in Winston County on the road to Houston. Blountsville and Blount Springs still exist, which make it possible to guess that Parker's Creek is Garden City today, and Hanna is either Hanceville or Johnson's Crossing. I'd also guess that Mount Alvis is present-day Vinemont and Stout's P.O. existed near the intersection of I-65 and Alabama Hwy. 69. An older map of north Jefferson County I have somewhere shows an old north/south road called Stout's Road, which doubtless led to that place.

After posting this message last night, I stared at my Alabama Atlas & Gazetteer some more, long enough to discover how wrong I was about everything in my earlier post. My eyes finally came across something called Day Gap Road on the gazetteer. It begins at Johnson's Crossing a couple of miles northwest of Hanceville, run west across I-65 and curves north to Ryan Creek near Grandview. From that point it would appear to be County Road 813, which intersects Alabama 278 about five miles west of Cullman. A small segment of road is also called Day Gap Road moving north to West Point, not far from Crooked Creek.

Evidently Streight's route took him south rather than east as I had supposed. That helps explain the distance involved between Day's Gap/Sand Mountain and Crooked Creek/Hog Mountain, which Streight believed to be ten miles. Although it is called something else on the 1902 map of Cullman, Day's Gap is just north of Battleground on Alabama 157. I've traveled that route from Birmingham to Tuscumbia many times and always enjoyed the panoramic view of the Tennessee Valley from this point.

Thanks for the assistance; I should have asked earlier. I share Hoyt's interest in older road beds. If we are ever committed to an asylum due to our strange interests, I hope we are placed in adjacent cells.

On a completely unrelated subject, those of you who have access to the Birmingham News might look for an article about the sinking of the "Robert E. Lee" during World War II. It was torpedoed in the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans on July 30, 1942. Divers working on an underwater pipeline found its wreckage as well as that of its adversary, U-166, at 5,000 feet. It's known that U-166 had been lost shortly after it sank the REL, but the sinking had been attributed to an AEF patrol two days later. Damage to U-166 makes it clear that the German sub was sunk by depth charges from a Coast Guard escort, which dropped six near the presumed site of the U-boat. I've always been fascinated by the German submarine offensive in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic waters just off the coast of former Confederate states, so this was really interesting. I'm sure many news services ran this article, so those of you who live elsewhere should be able to find it. The date of the incident isn't stated clearly, but it took place on July 30, 1942.