Words by Kelsey Ogletree
In northern Alabama, booksellers, photographers, designers, and historians are preserving the spirit of a town built on creativity, memories, and connection.
It’s Saturday afternoon in the late 1910s, and in downtown Florence, Alabama, the crowd is so thick, you couldn’t stir it with a stick. Along Court Street, the main thoroughfare, pedestrians weave around Ford Model Ts to grab a cone from the local ice cream parlor.
Florence was booming, fueled in large part by the construction of nearby Wilson Dam, which had drawn workers from across the country to northwest Alabama. And with all those newcomers came a growing hunger for news from home. Teenager Clyde W. Anderson noticed the growing demand. So he began selling local newspapers from workers’ hometowns, helping connect transplants to the communities they’d left behind.
That small operation soon became a newsstand built from piano crates in downtown Florence. Over time, it grew into a bookstore and eventually into Books-A-Million, the chain still owned by the Anderson family today, which now spans more than 250 stores nationwide.
The Andersons, along with many other inspired residents, have contributed much to Florence’s rich history as a town of storytellers. For generations, the vibrant town has drawn people who know how to preserve stories through books, photographs, textiles, music, and community traditions. Some never leave. Others do, only to eventually find their way back.
Billy Ray Warren, a longtime schoolteacher-turned-city historian, grew up in Florence and got his first job at the newsstand at age 16. “As a reader and a would-be writer, I was like a rabbit in a briar patch,” he says. “It was not work. It was like heaven.”
Anderson Newsstand
Being immersed in books and local news inspired Warren to launch his Walnut Street newsletter 51 years ago. He writes, types, and hand-delivers the print digest to his neighbors every month and picks up bits of news and fodder to include along his “daily constitutional” throughout his downtown neighborhood.
You might also run into him across town at Books-A-Million. Warren, whose love for stories has only grown with age, usually pops into the store’s coffee shop before browsing the shelves. “That’s in my blood, you know, all the way from Mobile Street when I was 16,” he says.
In Florence, storytelling doesn’t happen through words alone. Another local, Robert Rausch, had a nontraditional experience with books that shaped him into a different kind of storyteller. “I was dyslexic and couldn’t spell my name until I was in sixth grade,” he says. “I would read books and do reports, but I would get something totally different out of them than other people. I couldn’t talk or read in the same way, so the details became very important to me.”
That attention to detail led him to photography—first as a hobby, then as a career—shooting stories around the world for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, fashion houses, and more. After living in France, South Africa, Los Angeles, and New York, Rausch returned to Florence to raise his own family.
A few years ago, he launched The Studio Journal, a unique print magazine that showcases a wide range of stories through the lens of a specific theme—like “time” or “play”—in each issue. “I love this area and wanted to highlight it,” Rausch says, “but it’s definitely not my magazine anymore. It’s the community’s.”
The best part of Florence, he adds, is the people: “This is not a huge place, and you think we’d know all the cool people by now, but it’s constantly growing.”
Among them is another storyteller, Natalie Chanin, a Florence native who made her way to New York City and then Vienna, Austria, as soon as she could. “I didn’t think I’d come back,” she says. Chanin always had a love for design. When she started a new project cutting up T-shirts and sewing them back together, she realized Florence—then known as the “T-shirt capital of the world,” due to its cotton manufacturing industry—was where she needed to be. What began as a temporary return home to finish the project grew into the fashion brand Alabama Chanin, now sold in department stores around the world.
A little piece of Florence went out with every garment Chanin made. “I used to write poems on the side seams,” she explains. “Before shipping, we’d hang the pieces on the clothesline to air out, and stores would say, ‘When we open it, it smells like sunshine.’”
Alabama Chanin has since evolved into Project Threadways, a nonprofit that documents the history and community of the textile industry, which had deep roots in Florence, and offers garments and classes through The School of Making.
In Florence, stories have long been treated like something worth passing along—whether through newspapers, photographs, garments, or conversations between neighbors. More than 100 years after a teenage entrepreneur began selling hometown papers downtown, that creative instinct still shapes the city today. “It’s something mystical, magical even,” says Warren, “that makes people really treasure living here and want to come back.”
Editor’s Note: Charles C. Anderson Sr., son of Books-A-Million founder Clyde W. Anderson and a lifelong Florence resident, passed away on June 24, 2026, at age 91. His decades of leadership helped grow the family business from its Florence roots while his generosity left a lasting mark on the community he called home.
A Perfect Weekend in Florence, Alabama
A Curation of Locals’ Favorites
Explore & Experience
- Read, people-watch, or pack a picnic to enjoy at Wilson Park.
- Stroll along the scenic Tennessee River on the River Heritage Trail.
- Learn the history of cotton and enslavement in Pope’s Tavern Museum.
- Visit the Wichahpi Commemorative Stone Wall, also known as Tom’s Wall, one of the country’s largest memorials dedicated to a Native American woman.
Read, Shop & Browse
- Pick up your next read and a coffee at Books-A-Million or independently owned Court Street Books.
- Browse works from area artists at Stella & Goose.
- Shop downtown stores, hear live music, and mingle with locals at First Fridays, held May to October.
- Peruse fresh produce on Saturday mornings at Florence/Lauderdale Farmers Market.
Eat & Drink
- Indulge in homemade biscuits and chocolate gravy on Friday mornings at Staggs Grocery.
- Feast on farm-to-table cuisine at Odette.
- Catch a sunset with a cocktail in hand at GunRunner Boutique Hotel’s rooftop bar.
- Get a pimento cheese sandwich, chips, and a milkshake at 108-year-old Trowbridge’s.
