Everybody thinks Mardi Gras belongs to New Orleans. But I'm going to let you in on something the folks around here are mighty proud of: the very first Mardi Gras in America was not in New Orleans at all. It was right up the road, in Mobile, Alabama — and Mobile had been celebrating it for years before New Orleans was even founded.
Here's the history. Mobile was a French colonial town, one of the first European settlements on the whole Gulf Coast, founded back at the very start of the 1700s. And the French brought their Catholic carnival traditions with them — the feasting and masking and revelry before the fasting of Lent. So the first organized Mardi Gras celebration on American soil happened in Mobile, in the early 1700s, a good fifteen years before New Orleans existed. Mobile is the true birthplace of the American Mardi Gras. New Orleans made it famous; Mobile made it first.
And Mobile never let it go. To this day it throws one of the biggest Mardi Gras celebrations in the country — weeks of parades, secret societies with wonderful strange names, masked balls, marching bands, and floats tossing beads and moon pies to the crowds. Moon pies, mind you — that's a Mobile Mardi Gras specialty you won't find down in New Orleans. Whole families camp out along the parade routes for days.
So while you're down here on the Alabama Gulf Coast, know that you're an easy drive from where the whole rollicking American Mardi Gras tradition got its start, three hundred years ago and going strong. First in Mobile. Tell that to your friends from Louisiana and watch their faces. It's a fact, and it's a good one.
Photo: Unskinny Boppy · CC BY 2.0
