Wallace Turnage

In 1864, Wallace Turnage, a seventeen year old slave owned by merchant Collier Minge, whose house stood on this site, escaped wartime Mobile by walking 25 miles down the western shore of Mobile Bay. After surviving three weeks in the Fowl River estuary, he paddled a row boat into the bay. In late August 1864, he was taken to Fort Gaines and freed. His heroic emancipation was one of the most dramatic for African Americans in the Civil War. He later lived in New York City, where he wrote his rare narrative, discovered in 2003 and published in 2007 in the book, A Slave No More. Through bravery and determination on his fifth attempt to escape, Turnage seized his own freedom.

Mobile, Alabama · United States