In this episode, part two on Huntsville's mill villages, we'll be talking about the big shots (a.k.a. the guys who got streets names after them) who started the many mills in town, as well as the day-to-day lives of people who worked in these facilities and lived in the surrounding villages.  Join me in this season finale as I talk about lots of rich people from Massachusetts, fancy toilets, electric streetcars, serialized romance novels, and baseball!

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.

Lily Flagg's Signal will return January 2023.

There's a lot to talk about regarding the history of Huntsville's mills.  So much, in fact, that this will be a multi-part series!  Here in part one, I'll be talking about mill life in the early 1900s, including how images of children working at Merrimack and Dallas Mills were part of a national campaign to improve child labor laws.  There will also be fun facts about antique batteries, the story behind a local coffee shop's name, and a Charles Dickens reference I had to use Spark Notes to understand because I never read the book.

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.

A storm damaged spire creatively repaired, church bells missing due to miscommunications, Civil War legends about horses, a building relocated brick by brick across town, explanations behind lots of historical designations, and more await in the story of downtown Huntsville’s only National Historic Landmark: the Episcopal Church of the Nativity.

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.

You had to know it was coming: an episode about the era when the Rocket City started making rockets. Rather than a same-old discussion on who designed and flew the rockets, I instead wanted to focus on how the space race changed Huntsville as a city and some of the "by-products" of the population (and rocket) booms.  Join me for a discussion of archaeology, architecture, awful traffic, an attempted amusement park, and absolutely no mentions of that German guy they named the civic center after.

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.

What combined the rapid-fire news blurbs of Twitter, the advertising-disguised-as-commentary of Instagram influencers, the political-leaning news of that link your conspiracy-theorist-uncle just sent you, the social updates on people you don’t know of Facebook, the sensationalized murder stories of a true-crime podcast, and the urgent sounding yet dubiously scientific healthcare advertisements of, well, everywhere online?  Victorian-era newspapers, of course!  In this episode, I’ll be talking about how Huntsville’s 1890s newspapers were, in many ways, not all that different than the media we consume today.  I’ll be highlighting a specific newspaper - the Huntsville Gazette – and how one of the state’s most successful Black-run newspapers at the time got information into the hands of its readers every week.

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.

Signal's Lily Flagg: she set a world record in Huntsville in 1892. She had elaborate parties thrown here in her honor but was invited to neither. She was disqualified from a competition at the Chicago World's Fair for being too good at what she does. She had multiple streets, businesses, a podcast, and a neighborhood named for her.  Oh, and she was a Jersey cow.

The Maple Hill Cemetery Stroll is one of my favorite reenactment events, as it's a time that thousands of Huntsville residents come out to see local historical figures "come alive".  As one of the sixty or so costumed character actors at this year's stroll, I thought it would be fun to share a little bit about my character - Mrs. Bessie K. Russell - and walk you through a day at the stroll.

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.  Full episode transcript is available on the show's website.

The Lily Flagg's Signal Preserving Huntsville History series is a collection of interviews with local historians, preservationists, storytellers, and other experts passionate about saving and sharing the history of Huntsville, Alabama.  In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with Heather Adkins,  Manager of Special Collections at the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library (HMCPL).  We discussed a day in the life of archive staff, where the items in the collection originate, some very impressive five hundred year old books, the HMCPL Main Branch's loveable resident puppet, and - just in time for Halloween - some spiders and other weird/wonderful surprises in the library's collections.  Be forewarned, though: by the end of the conversation I was ready to change careers to become an archivist, and after listening, you may, too!

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.

Who was Huntsville's first mayor?  When I looked online, everywhere I found said the leader from 1812 to 1816 was "unknown," and that just wouldn't do.  The search for the answer to this seemingly simple question lead me down a rabbit hole of historical figures, terminology (was it "president" or "mayor"?), and eventually to the discovery that the internet and other modern writings are sometimes wrong when it comes to local history.  It's a lesson in checking your sources and finding a reason to edit Wikipedia.

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.  Full episode transcript is available on the show's website.

I knew an older fellow who once used the phrase “looks like the southbound end of a northbound horse” to describe things that were just a little bit... off in appearance. Horses are one thing, but what about houses? What if your house was supposed to face south, but the person in charge of building it had no idea how to read the blueprints and ended up having the house built facing north? Then what?

On this first full-length episode (22 min) of the first season of Lily Flagg’s Signal, we’ll be talking about a downtown Huntsville home where that exact thing happened, in which the building may or may not have been built with the wrong side facing the street, so passers-by are in fact seeing the southbound end of a northbound house.

For more Huntsville, Alabama, history you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on Instagram at @lilyflaggpodcast, and check out our blog at lilyflaggpodcast.wordpress.com.  Full episode transcript is available on the show's website.