Beyond the Faire: Through untold stories, Billy Ray Warren has preserved history
By Chelsea Retherford | Living 50 Plus
Most in Florence know Billy Ray Warren as the founder of the annual Alabama Renaissance Faire, now in its 39th year. Few, however, know all the work he puts in behind the scenes for other major projects as city historian.
For Warren, history has never been just about dates on a page. It’s about people and how their stories ripple out to help shape communities. That conviction has carried him through five decades as a teacher, curriculum director, preservation advocate, and, since 2016, Florence’s official historian.
“This might sound a little hokey, but I believe every person owes something to the soil that nurtures them,” he said. “For me, that debt is paid by preserving and passing along the history of this county.”
Before he dedicated so much of his adult life to preserving the history and stories of people from Lauderdale County, Warren was a teacher. It’s a career choice he seemed almost destined for, having come from a long line of educators on both sides of his family.
“My uncle was a teacher who taught my mother in a little two-room school house in Marion County. She was much younger than he was, and that’s where they grew up,” Warren said.
“Even on my dad’s side, one of his brothers was the superintendent of education in this county. I never knew him. He died long before I was born, but because of his connection to education, he was definitely an influence. We were a family of teachers.”
Though he’d always been interested in history and English, those weren’t the focus of Warren’s degree when he enrolled at the University of North Alabama — then known as Florence State Teachers College. While he knew he wanted to become an educator, he had chosen different subjects to teach.
“When I started at UNA, it was the year that Sputnik was launched by Russia,” he recalled. “Well, every young person graduating from high school then was going to major in math, chemistry or both. It was our patriotic duty. We had to get ahead of those Russians, you know.”
During his first two years as a student, Warren was dedicated to mathematics and chemistry, but by the end of his sophomore year, he knew he had been in denial about his true aspirations. He still wanted to pursue a position in the classroom, but he knew he no longer wanted to teach numbers or science.
So, he switched to the humanities and never looked back.
As a student, Warren fell under the influence of Dr. Bernard Cresap, a professor who approached history through biographies.
“His whole premise was, if it weren’t for people, there’d be no history. If you tell the stories of individual lives, you illuminate the bigger picture of the times,” Warren said. “I guess that just stuck with me.”
It was a practice he carried into his own classroom — first at Lee High School in Huntsville and a year later, back in his hometown at Coffee High.
Warren developed a reputation for weaving literature, art and history together into immersive lessons. Eventually, he stepped up as curriculum director for Florence City Schools, where he encouraged teachers to think across disciplines.
It was in this spirit that the Alabama Renaissance Faire was born.
“I knew I wanted to establish a festival, and I knew that, number one, it should happen during the school year, because most festivals were held in the summer, and number two, I wanted an event that would cut across as many curriculum lines as possible,” Warren said.
“The idea for a Renaissance Faire was a no-brainer. It just kind of fell into my lap. So, those talks began in July of 1987, and nobody told us that we couldn’t have the Renaissance Faire three months later. So, we did it, and the rest is, as they say, history.”
All the while Warren was helping to grow the festival, which would become the state’s official Renaissance Faire, he was also volunteering with Heritage Preservation Inc. (HPI), an advocacy group founded in 1984.
“I was not one of the founders of HPI, but my interest in historic preservation was already known,” Warren said. “I’ve been with it almost from the beginning, and I have served as chairman for several years now.”
In partnership with several other historical organizations and societies throughout the Shoals, Warren said HPI helped establish 10 historic districts in Florence. He continues to advocate for endangered historic structures throughout Lauderdale County.
“HPI is not an official city body. It’s not appointed by the city council,” he explained. “It’s a non-profit, and it’s community-based. We do a wide variety of things within that advocacy of preserving important historic buildings, homes and sites like cemeteries.”
Current projects include promoting the sale of plaques that identify a site’s historic value. Past projects have included the creation of calendars, a book and DVD featuring the county’s historic sites and stories — for which Warren provided most of the writing — as fundraisers to aid HPI in its preservation efforts.
The group also champions recognition for some of Florence and Lauderdale County’s forgotten or untold stories.
In September, HPI attended the unveiling of a historic marker that now stands near the entrance to Joe Wheeler State Park to commemorate Camp Drake, open to Black members of the Boy Scouts during a time of segregation.
Warren said HPI wasn’t responsible for telling the story or organizing the marker. The task was undertaken by the East Lauderdale Historical Society. However, Warren said HPI is always eager to partner with other groups that share the same goals, especially for projects like the one for Camp Drake.
“I hate to say that I didn’t even know that camp existed,” Warren admits. “I attended Camp Westmoreland when I was young and in the Boy Scouts, but I didn’t know that the African American boys had a separate camp. I’m so pleased we were able to come together to acknowledge and honor that.”
As dedicated as he has been to sharing local history for decades, Warren admits it isn’t the first time he’s learned something new or expanded his knowledge about a known subject, and he’s sure it won’t be the last.
One of his roles with the City of Florence is to lead walking tours through some of the city’s historic districts. He holds walking tours in three of the city’s downtown historic districts every April.
As many times as he’s given these talks and walks, Warren said it never gets old to him — one, because his audience is usually different, and two, because he enjoys studying the histories time and again to unravel new stories about the places he knows so well.
“Every year, I think to myself, ‘Alright, everybody who wants to come on this tour has already been, so I likely won’t have a large crowd this year.’ And nearly every year, 80 people show up,” Warren said with a laugh.
“Occasionally, there will be some who have already been on it with me. I guess they’re checking to see if I tell the same the story. Usually, my stories are the same, but in between the seasons, I will have read something else or found out another little tidbit. It’s exciting when that does happen.
“I’m pretty well focused on Florence and Lauderdale history,” Warren continued. “Now, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in U.S. history or even Colbert County history, but my focus has been this county. Of course, the history is so rich, I won’t ever be able to plumb all its depths. I reconciled myself to that long ago.”
All those years of quietly advocating for the area’s untold stories are perhaps what led to Warren’s eventual appointment as city historian.
He formally stepped into the role — an unpaid position — the very same month he retired as the school system’s curriculum director in January of 2016. At that time, Mickey Haddock was serving as the mayor of Florence, but the idea for a new city historian came from Andy Betterton, who was serving on the council then.
“Bill McDonald had been the city historian for years, but he was older and became ill. There was a span for several years when there was not a city historian,” Warren said. “Now, I could never fill Bill McDonald’s shoes. He was a top-notch historian.”
In his role, Warren holds office hours from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Those hours are all voluntary, and most of them aren’t actually spent at his desk.
Some days, he may be meeting with the mayor to plan upcoming events for the city. Others, he may be dedicated to upcoming projects with HPI or helping to organize the Renaissance Faire. At any time, he could be called on to lead a walking tour for incoming tourists.
“It’s all self-imposed,” he said with a laugh. “But this is good for me therapeutically. I think it’s better for me than I am for the position.”
While he remains quiet and humble about most of his work, the project he is perhaps most proud of is the Florence Walk of Honor, a small trail of pillars dedicated to the recognition of some of Lauderdale County’s highest achievers.
The idea was presented in 2006 by then-Mayor Bobby Irons, Warren said. One year later, the pillars were being erected at River Heritage Park near Renaissance Shoals Resort & Spa — formerly Marriott Shoals — and the first plaques were being installed.
The Walk of Honor committee, which Warren also chairs, selects four new recipients every year to be mounted along the trail with the others. There are more than 60 plaques mounted to date, but Warren knows the personal stories to all.
“Every time I think about this, it kind of boggles me, but there are four honorees up there who were all from the same graduating class — 1967 at Coffee High School,” Warren said, scanning his mental file for details about some of the faces and stories forever venerated on the honor path.
“Now, all four of those weren’t chosen in the same year. They were all added over time, but isn’t that something? There must’ve been something in the water that year,” Warren said jokingly.
Those four honorees were Hank Klibanoff, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his book, “The Race Beat;” Lynn Middleton Sibley, who dedicated her career to reducing childbirth mortality for mothers and newborns and was awarded an $8.1 million grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for her work with midwives in Africa; Lt. Col. Ed Yielding, who flew more than 90 worldwide reconnaissance missions and in 1990 set a coast-to-coast flight record of 67 minutes and 54 seconds in the SR-71 spy plane; and Mike Mobbs, who was a leader in negotiations between the U.S. and the USSR in the 1980s, resulting in one of the most complex arms control treaties in history.
“It’s not about making money and being recognized,” Warren said. “It’s about doing things that enhance the community and enhance the world. These honorees have achieved something at the national or international level, so that separates a lot of folks out there. Also, we were careful to say that it would encompass all fields of endeavor.”
While many athletes and musicians from the Shoals have gone on to earn national recognition for their talents and achievements, Warren acknowledges that there are already spaces like sports halls and music halls of fame for those people to be honored.
“That’s not to say that we don’t have any musicians or sports figures honored on the Walk,” he said. “But we also want to save space for people who have achieved in the arts, in law, in education, or whatever it may be. Those achievements are just as important.”
With dozens of nominations still waiting for consideration, Warren is thrilled to still be focusing on the project nearly 20 years later. After all, part of his passion for sharing local histories is inherently intertwined with sharing people’s stories.
“We have a binder full of people who have been declared eligible for a plaque. We’re never going to run out of honorees,” Warren said. “For a county our size, of just about 97,000 people, isn’t that remarkable!”