Toulminville, Alabama

The area of Toulminville has varied over the past decades from being an upper-middle class suburb to having a serious crime problem during most of the 1980s and 1990s, although the trend has been reversed in recent years.

Toulminville remained a largely rural settlement until after the Civil War, when it slowly took on the character of a suburb to Mobile.

By World War II, Toulminville had become an upper-middle class suburb, with many affluent neighborhoods built along Stanton and Summerville streets.

Middle and upper-class whites began to move out of the city to newer housing, especially after desegregation following civil rights advances of the 1960s.

(In 1986 a white nun was raped and murdered by a black man in a notorious incident at Catholic Cemetery on Stone Street, now Martin Luther King Avenue.)

Toulminville was the birthplace of United States Surgeon General William Crawford Gorgas, who worked to control yellow fever and malaria during World War I.