FURMAN, Ala. — I knew it had to be here.
I drove back and forth, up and down highways and narrow trails in the tiny place back in a corner of Wilcox County.
My search started a week earlier, with a summons to see Miss Alice Lee. At 98 years old, she was Alabama’s oldest practicing woman attorney.
She had a tip for me about a story in Furman that came from Kathryn Tucker Windham.
Now, Kathryn Tucker Windham happens to have written the book that hooked me on reading. I spent many evenings reliving the tales in her ghost stories.
I was hoping to schedule an interview with her about the story from Miss Lee, but when I called, she said she was busy this time of year.
She’s earned the right to do as she pleases. So I located her book, “Alabama, One Big Front Porch,” and quickly turned to the story.
It told in the author’s rich style of a wealthy man in east Alabama, who planned his funeral and his headstone, paying a fortune to have Italian sculptors recreate a life-size statue of himself to be placed on his grave.
After his death, the crate arrived, and a delegation from a local church met the workmen as they prepared to erect the monument.
The church members had the work stopped, as they had decided the statue was a graven image, prohibited by the Ten Commandments.
Eventually, they struck a deal, and the statue was allowed, but only if it was lying down.
An anonymous person or persons did place it upright long after the furor cooled.
I criss-crossed Furman, enjoying the landscape framed by moss-draped trees and kudzu monsters.
Several homes from the early 1800s have been restored to their glory, and many more sit just off the highway with weeds growing taller, paint long gone from their exteriors.
I passed the Wakefield Plantation, the Fox Hill Plantation, Furman Methodist and Bethsaida Baptist churches. No cemetery, no statue.
I asked Bessie M. Gordon at the post office, and she pointed me to some local cemeteries, but no statue. I asked a man mowing grass at Fox Hill, and he said the only statue of a man in a cemetery he knew of was in Pine Hill.
So off I went, eight miles down the road. I pulled in and, sure enough, there to the right, lording over the graveyard, was a statue of William Joseph Melton. He was born Sept. 29, 1846, and died July 4, 1900.
The statue sits atop a 7-foot base, hand on cane, ring on his right middle finger and pocket watch strung proudly across his belly. The handlebar moustache is immaculately groomed, and the hat looks just right.
(Roads Less Traveled features out-of-the-way places with rich histories or unusual claims to fame, interesting sites and social features. Know any? Call Regional Editor John Hasselwander at 251-219-5651. Or write to Roads Less Traveled; Regional News Desk; Mobile Register; P.O. Box 2488; Mobile, AL 36652-2488 . Or e-mail: region@press-register.com.)