Program

Legends & Lore®

Subject

Folklore

Location

6233 Co Rd 214, Trinity, AL 35673, USA

Lat/Long

34.56429, -87.165225

Grant Recipient

Lawrence County History and Preservation Society

The Borghinis were a legendary historical family from the Caddo community of Lawrence County, Alabama. Italian immigrant Salvatore Borghini, Sr., married Kentucky girl Jane Stegall and, in 1849, relocated to a four-hundred-acre ranch in Caddo, where they raised a son, Salvatore Borghini, Jr., and two daughters, Dora and Mary.

Salvatore Borghini, Jr., disappeared in 1870, never to be seen again. His whereabouts are one of the several legends associated with the Borghini family. Many thought he had fled the country, possibly for Italy and its believed likely to escape a murder prosecution. Two years later, Salvatore Borghini, Sr., died of heart failure, leaving his wife Jane and his daughters Dora and Mary to fend for themselves in the ravaged post-Civil War American South. As Italians and Catholics, they had always felt isolated from the rest of the Caddo community. They bought their acreage, for example, from the U.S. government, not from a neighbor, and none of the Borghini children ever married.

The Borghini women were saddled with a large farm to manage. Left to their own devices, the Borghini sisters became legends themselves. It was said they worked their own land, rustled their own cattle, and rode horses better than any man. They wore trousers, toted pistols, and smoked corncob pipes. To make ends meet, they did a bit of moonshining, though with an Italian flair. Instead of whiskey, the sisters specialized in blackberry and grape wine, stomping the fruit with their bare feet, as it had been done in the old country.

The sisters also found a fair amount of trouble. They would catch charges over the years for concealing a pistol, fighting with sheriff’s deputies, and assaulting a roadcrew blazing a mail route through their property. They were even suspected of burning down a neighbor’s house, though the accusation was never proven.

Even their deaths were out of the ordinary. While grinding grist, Dora died in a freak sawmill explosion in 1912, and Mary died of an injured leg that turned gangrenous in 1925. The sisters are buried beside one another in the Caddo Cemetery. Their Borghini family legend lives on to this day for Dora and Mary’s unconventional exploits and unapologetic independence.