Research in the Spanish Borderlands: Alabama

When One Examines the Research and Writing on Spanish Colonial Alabama, 1780-1813, it is possible to conclude that this area has received the least emphasis of all Spanish Borderlands. This is unfortunate because there are tens of thousands of original sources extant. As the director of a University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa research project, which began in 1966, Holmes collected some 20,000 pages of documents from Sevilla and Simancas on microfilm. The so-called “Holmes Collection” has been copied for several libraries in the Southeast, including Alabama, Auburn, Florida, West Florida and Tulane universities. A brief description of the twenty-nine reels appears in Coker and Holmes (1971).