50 States of Wonder
4 Monuments to Alabama’s Beloved Animals

In 1973, Tom Mann—a fishing legend and founder of Mann’s Bait Company—hooked a bass in Lake Eufaula, and felt that this one was different. So Mann took the fish home, put him in a pool with dozens of other giant largemouths, and named him “Leroy Brown” after the Jim Croce song released a year earlier. Leroy had an aggressiveness that forced bigger fish to avoid him, and soon he was moved to a 38,000-gallon aquarium inside Tom Mann’s Fish World.

When Leroy Brown died on August 20, 1980, Mann hosted a funeral for the beloved bass. The governor of Alabama declared a day of mourning, and telegrams came from country music stars including Hank Williams Jr., and Porter Wagoner. Hundreds attended the memorial service to walk past the velvet-lined Plano tacklebox coffin to place a Jelly Worm inside, and the Eufaula High School band performed (what else?) “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” Today, the fish has a marble tombstone and memorial statue, engraved with a wistful sendoff: “Most bass are just fish but Leroy Brown was something special.”

Just outside of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center is the final resting place of a spacefaring squirrel monkey. The American space program launched the primate, dubbed Miss Baker, into the sky for 16 minutes in 1959. Afterwards, scientists safely recovered her and her high-flying companion, Miss Able, from the Atlantic Ocean—the first time they had blasted primates to space and welcomed the creatures home alive.

Miss Baker then lived for more than a decade at the Naval Aerospace Medical Center in Pensacola before dying of kidney failure. Her gravestone is often festooned with bananas—a nod to the controversial practice of sending non-consenting living things to space, and a tender memorial to a monkey that survived the trip.

The elegant Boll Weevil Monument, erected in 1919, is a rarity: a beautiful sculpture built to honor an agricultural menace. The pest, which destroys cotton crops, was once the scourge of farmers across the American South and portions of Mexico and South America. But disaster spawned some bright ideas. Growers in Enterprise, Alabama, who had long been dependent on cotton, took the weevil’s arrival as motivation to diversify their crops. This led to the discovery that other crops, such as peanuts, could flourish on the same land—and that led to an influx of money flowing into the area. In 1998, the original statue was vandalized. It was removed to the nearby Depot Museum, and a replica went up in its place. The prized pest is still front and center.

If you really, really, really adore your pup—and that pup happens to be a coonhound—you might bury it among some of its fellow Good Doggos in this cemetery exclusively for dogs that helped their owners track and hunt raccoons. For more than 80 years, bereaved owners have buried their dogs beneath tender inscriptions emblazoned on wood, sheet metal, and more. The graveyard is a loving monument to the relationship between humans and their floppy-eared friends.