DOTHAN ALABAMA
THE FOUNDING OF DOTHAN
Marker Text: In the late 1700s and 1800s, horse and ox-drawn covered wagons from Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville traveled across the South as pioneer families searched for a place to build new homes and to start a new life. Those pioneers, who passed through the vast pine forests in the southeast corner of the territory that was later to become the state of Alabama, would often stop at a spring know as Poplar Head. Poplar Spring, named for the poplar trees that encircled the glade where the cool water, or ”head” (as springs were often called) welled from the earth. It was where ancient Indian trails met, crossed, and then continued on. The glade where the spring was located was often used by Indians from the various tribes of the Creek Confederacy as a meeting place and as a campground. By 1885, the hamlet had grown into a village. The new settlers realized that if the community’s growth was to be sustained, they would need a governing body and local law enforcement. On November 10, 1885, the people of Poplar Head voted to incorporate and took Dothan as the new town’s name since there was already was a Poplar Head, Alabama. The name come from Genesis 37:17 “….for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan.” “A writer can put on paper the history of the town, but the history belongs to those who not only lived through the years documented, but who formed and molded out town into the city we know as Dothan.” – “Dothan, A Pictorial History,” 1984, by Wendell H. Stepp and daughter Pamela Ann Steep.
In the early 1830's lumber and turpentine operators began crossing the Chattahoochee River into Alabama. They also found the clearing convenient and camped there on their way to Tombigbee settlements farther west.
THE EMASSEEES AND MALUNJINS
One tribe of Indians and a community of mixed breed Indians were unmolested by the whites. These were the Uchees or Emassees, kinsman of the Seminoles or Creeks, who lived at the mouth of the Emassee or O'Mussee or Mercer creek near Columbia, and the Malunjins, a mixed breed community residing some three to sixmiles northeast of Dothan toward Webb even as late as 1865. Where the Malunjins came from nobody knows; where they were dispersed to is the limbo of forgotten men. B. P. Poyner, Sr., father of Houston County Probate Judge, S.P.Poyner, was born in the Malunjins' community. Some of these mixed breed Indians brought milkto Mr. Poyner's mother while he was an infant. The Emassees were allied by affinity with the Creeks and Seminoles yet during all of Alabama's territorial and state days were friendly to the whites. Only a squatter white family settled here and there and lived in old Henry County prior to 1817. Save for these squatters there were no white settlers in Henry County at the time of the Creek War of 1812-13.
The Alabama Lawyer: Official Organ State Bar of AlabamaDothan Eagle (Dothan, Alabama)
By Alabama State Bar
Published by The Bar, 1942
27 Oct 1953
Mystery Of Malunjin Indians Baffles All Making Efforts Toward Solution
The Malunjin Indians - they walked the earth as late as 1865 - were quite a problem for those who have been helping put together the Houston County story.
Where they came from and where they went, nobody seems to know. The Malungjins carried their knowledge to the grave where most of it is preserved.
Oscar L. Tompkins, author of Wiregrass Sagas, gives the reader a fleeting glimpse of this tribe - but no more.
He points out that the Malunjins were a "mixed breed community, residing some three to six miles northeast of Dothan."
"Where they dispersed to is the limbo of forgotten men," Tompkins declares.
Tompkins got his trace of the Indians from the late B. P. Potner, born near the Malunjins' community. Some of them used to bring milk to Mr. Poyner's mopther while he was quite young. He could remember them.
The Poyners lived in the rural area of Houston County between Webb and Kinsey.
B.P. Poyner, Jr., Dothan businessman could shed little light on the Malunjuns- although baffling - were more truth than fiction, Eagle chroniclers fanned out their search.
It even led to the alabama Bureau of Archives and History. But the letter from there was as blank as the stares most people gave when you asked the stock question:
"Did you ever hear of the Malunjin Indians who used to live in Houston County?"
An Eagle reporter even interviewed a 104-year old man who spent most of his adult life in Kinsey. His memory failed him on the Malunjin subject and the search continued.
Did you ever eat any Malunjin bread? Or did you call it "syrup cake?"
The Malunjins were noted for this mixture of flour, egg, milk, seasoning and syrup-instead of sugar. This suggests that they made a meager existence. Syrup being more plentiful than sugar and less expensive, was an ingredient that found its way into muc of the Malunjin squaw's cooking.
Exactly whether the Malunjins gave the Wiregrass cook this syrup cake delicacy can't be substantiated by records. But many believe they were the first to make syrup cake.
And Malunjin bread still graces many a table, not always because the family can't afford sugar but because a good slice of syrup cake has no substitue.
When the white man moved into this territory to settle-the Indians notwithstanding-he left only two tribes unmolested, according to Tompkins' Sagas.
One was the Uchees or Emasees, kinsmen of the Creeks or Seminoles who lived at the mouth of the Emmassee (O'Mussee or Mercer) Creek near Columbia.
Part Indian
The other was the Malunjins of the 1860s.
The Emassees were friendly to the whites throughout Alabama's territorial days which might explain why whites spared them.
The Malunjins were part Indian and part white which apparently explains why the whites spared them.
But where they came from-where they went, nobody seems to know.
Did you ever hear of the Malunjin Indians who used to live in Houston County?"
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More later on these Malunjin families, mixed Indians, found in Dothan, Henry County in the 1830s, the GIBSONS BUNCH CUMBO LOWERY etc. Stay Tuned
