February 25, 1800

Congressman Francis Strother Lyon was born in North Carolina. Lyon moved to St. Stephens in 1817, where he found work as a bank clerk and county court clerk before opening a law practice in Demopolis in 1821. One of the state’s most successful attorneys, he served in the Alabama Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives and the First and Second Confederate Congresses, where he served as chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means. Lyon also served as a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention of 1875, where he authored the draft of the constitution that was adopted. His Demopolis plantation house, Bluff Hall, notable for its Greek Revival-style architecture, is open to the public as a house museum.

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Bluff Hall, Demopolis, 1939. (Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Bluff Hall, Demopolis, 1939. (Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Bluff Hall, Demopolis, April 3, 1934. (Photograph by W.N. Manning, HABS, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.