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The Life and Afterlife of 19th-Century Builder, Alexander Jackson Bragg

Bragg Mitchell Mansion
Mobile, AL

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Cartledge Weeden Blackwell, III, Cart, is an architectural historian and the curator of the Mobile Carnival Museum. Blackwell was born in Selma, Alabama. He obtained undergraduate degrees in art history and historic preservation from the College of Charleston in 2005. In 2008, Blackwell received his MA in Architectural History from the University of Virginia. His scholarly focus is American art and architecture, particularly that of the Southeast. Cart authored Of People and Of Place: Portraiture in Alabama (1870-1945), Reconstruction to Modernism for the Alabama Chapter of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA). Blackwells second book, Of Color and Light: The Life and Art of Artist-Designer Clara Weaver Parrish, is to be published by the University of Alabama Press in the Winter of 2025. His articles have appeared in Access, Alabama Heritage, Alabama Magazine, Arris, and Mobile Bay. He is a board and/or trustee of the following institutions: Architectural Review Board (ARB) of the City of Mobile, Friends of Magnolia Cemetery, National Register (NR) Review Board of the State of Alabama, and other historic preservation-allied entities.

When compared to the accounts of his better-known siblings, which include a judge, a general, and a governor, the life of builder Alexander Jackson Bragg (1815-1877) is all too often, if at all, recounted only in footnotes of publications examining American history. Sandy Bragg, as Alexander Bragg was known to family and friends, deserves far greater recognition in terms of his profession as a builder and the reverberating resonance of his work into the present-day. Bragg was among the thousands of master builders who designed and constructed the majority of early American architecture. His buildings represent multiple building uses, architectural styles, building typologies, construction technologies, and labor productions. From his time as an apprentice to his father in his native North Carolina to his long career as a master builder in adopted home in Alabama, Sandy Braggs life and buildings comprise an opportunity to better understand the many impulses behind the construction of the 19th Century American South. Of equal importance, Braggs buildings are often employed as symbols of historical interpretation of real and imagined visions of the region which he literally and figuratively helped to build. Through an examination of primary source material, examinations of his buildings, and study of multiple waves of scholarship, this presentation explores the life of a man, the nature of his profession, and continued resonance of his work.

Location

Bragg Mitchell Mansion
1906 Springhill Avenue
Mobile, AL 36607
United States

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