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I'm reminded of some old stories in chatting with my friend Charles Williams, whose daddy was longtime mayor of Athens and an old fox of politicking.

 
If you grew up in Limestone County like I did, then you might have heard the story of the old rebel ironclad called The Gar that protected these parts of the Tennessee River from Grant's army. She was sheltered from the Yankee gunboats by the Muscle Shoals and she was to prowl as she pleased up and down the river these parts. She was financed by Drake Shoney, a sesech cotton planter from Athens and the county's deadliest duck hunter, who said to hell with the Union and bought a steam scow from the pilot Linus Poteat, who said to hell with the Union too.

 
Rumors of the ironclad's construction spread and were greatly exaggerated by the Yankee press. It was said Grant couldn't cross the River here because as long as The Gar was afloat, it could chop his ferryboats to matchsticks with its guns. So he had to swing his army west and cross the Tennessee above the Shoals at a place now called Shiloh, where The Gar could not molest his crossing.

Folks from all over county came down in their buggies to Buelah Bay where she was cheerfully christened beside the tall grasses. For long days work was done by volunteers while the ladies picnicked. She wasn't but thirty foot long. They lashed her with sheets of tin, and all bits of ploughshares and gin work, cast iron cookery and lumber ties. When the folks of Limestone County had finished with her, The Gar looked like some shaggy metallic duck blind, or perhaps a floating doodlebug.

 
At any rate, she carried a single gun cast crooked from the bell of Buelah Land Apostolic Church, which was donated by the fire eating preacher Hieronymus Rhett, who believe in predestiny and thought all his congregation was going to hell anyhow. He had done the math on 144,000 and shuttered his church doors to fight Yankees. The Gar's single boiler doubled as a still with which Linus Poteat, who was a notorious lush, mixed powerful and melodious elixirs. Such were the proclivities of vice that were natural to both Shoney and Poteat that they took The Gar out one night to fish off Lucy's Branch, shooting birds and taking to their cups. What was supposed to be one night out catfishing turned into a three day drunken bender during which the great Battle of Shiloh was fought up the way while The Gar mysteriously burned down to the waterline in the Elk River.

 
Drake Shoney and Linus Poteat swam to shore exclaiming it was a boiler explosion that had sunk The Gar. They blamed it on a Yankee gun battery that had set up on the opposite bank, and with which they tussled with their single crooked gun. Most folks in town, though, knew about those two boys when the moon goes full and whiskey gets poured. And so goes the story of the Tennessee River's only ironclad gunboat, built in Limestone County, Ala.