Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham funds cultural tourism

The Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham awarded $24,000 to the Wallace Center for “Preparing for Arts and Cultural Tourism at the Wallace House in Harpersville”. This grant allows us 1) to begin our planning process with the city of Harpersville to develop an arts and cultural tourism plan for the city and 2) to develop our experiential interpretation of the property for visitors to experience. These objectives are part of a long term project to have a multi-media experience for visitors to the house. We envison a future in which tourists visiting central Alabama come to understand the full reparative history of the Wallace plantation and reflect on what this experience means specifically to them. We also see that this boost to tourism will benefit the lives of local residents and economic development of the city.

The Community Foundation grant comes together with funding from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Alabama Humanities Alliance, and individual donors to create a wonderful experience that spans the full history of the Wallace House and land. While we begin with enslavement and reconstruction, we reach back to the removal of Muskogee Creeks from the land as part of settler colonialism, and continue through the Great Migration and Jim Crow, setting the stage for the conditions addressed by the Civil Rights Movement.