The story of Africatown is not the story of the Clotilda. But the possible rediscovery of the slave ship's wreckage is a reminder that while the ship had no future after its fateful 1860 voyage, those imprisoned aboard it did.

"Even though it's a terrible story, it's uplifting," historian Sylviane Diouf said in a 2007 Press-Register interview about her groundbreaking book on the subject. "It's not about what was done to them. It's about what they did. They came as children, maintained their traditions, their language. If they could do that, we can do anything."

Accounts generally agree that the Clotilda brought 110 to 120 Africans to Mobile in 1860 and that they initially were split into several large groups in slavery. The end of the Civil War found one of these groups left to its own devices in an area about three miles north of downtown Mobile. The area is generally known as Plateau or Magazine Point, a peninsula where Three Mile Creek and Chickasabogue creek converge on the Mobile River.

Still strangers in a strange land, the Africans formed a self-reliant community where they could maintain their language and customs. Some of the other former Clotilda slaves found their way back to the group.

The city of Mobile's Africatown Neighborhood Plan, a blueprint for revitalization and preservation prepared in 2015 and 2016, offers a quick summary of what came next for the community initially known as "African Town."

Working in local shipyards and mills, they saved money to buy land including some from their former owners. African Town originally included a 50-acre community in the Plateau area and a smaller one, Lewis Quarters, which consisted of seven acres over a mile to the west of the larger settlement. Lewis Quarters was named after one of its founders, Charlie Lewis. The settlers appointed Peter Lee as their chief and established a governmental system based on African law.

The residents of African Town built the first school in the area. In 1872 they built Old Landmark Baptist Church, which is now Union Missionary Baptist Church. While the community retained much of their West African culture, construction of the church signaled the conversion to Christianity of many of the Africans. They were a tight-knit community known for sharing and helping one another but reportedly had tense relations with both whites and African Americans and so largely kept to themselves.

For her book "Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Last Africans Brought to America," Diouf dug deep into the experience of life in African Town. Her sources included texts based on first-person interviews with former Clotilda slave Cudjo "Kazoola" Lewis conducted by white Mobile schoolteacher Emma Langdon Roche and black author Zora Neale Hurston. (Lewis, who died in 1935 at an estimated age of 94, is a legendary figure in his own right as an embodiment of Africatown heritage.)

A Press-Register reviewer wrote of Diouf's findings: "The old interviews make abundantly clear that Lewis and his comrades were terrified and traumatized by their kidnapping and trans-Atlantic voyage. Their life in Alabama was very difficult, first for a few years as slaves and then in freedom. Not only did they have to contend with prejudice from whites, but their black neighbors considered them to be oddities who were crude, fierce and inscrutable."

Wrote Diouf: "Their town was unique; it was the first time that a group of Africans - besides the maroons who had hid their camps in swamps and woods since the seventeenth century - had built their very own town on their own land in the United States."

Africatown maintained a sense of apartness from Mobile well into the 20th century: Mobile was a small city and Plateau was an outlying area amid marshy and undeveloped terrain. But World War II fueled rapid growth, and Mobile industry sprawled northward along the river. Like any ethnic group in America, the residents of Africatown were subject to a natural process of assimilation. Now the community faced additional pressure from industrial encroachment, with related concerns such as pollution.

In recent decades, the fate of Africatown has been a struggle. The area has had its champions, and has found some sympathetic ears in local government. But has been beset by pervasive blight. According to the city development plan, the 2010 U.S. Census showed 1,881 residents in the area. But the same report found "virtually no non-industrial businesses," vacant commercial buildings, and many severely dilapidated homes.

There have been some positive developments: Africatown was added to the Natioal Register of Historic Places in 2012. It's also a part of the Dora Franklin Finley African-American Heritage Trail, which guides interested visitors to sites of interest in and around Mobile. In 2016 the Mobile City Council voted to give Bay Bridge Road the honorary designation "Africatown Boulevard." Efforts have been made to bridge the gap between the community and the industry surrounding it.

The city's development plan represents an attempt to sum up Africatown's assets and challenges and map out a way to develop the former while remediating the latter. But its proposals - which include building an Africatown history center and park, developing affordable housing and clearing blighted or abandoned properties - will require heavy public and private investment and a cooperative effort that could last decades.

Despite the challenges, Africatown's story is too special to be lost. In fact, it recently was catapulted back to national attention via an unexpected connection on the PBS geneology show "Finding Your Roots." In one episode the influential musician and author Amir "Questlove" Thompson learns that his personal family heritage includes an ancestor, Charles Lewis, who was taken aboard the Clotilda and became one of Africatown's founders.

As a thunderstruck Questlove processes what host Henry Louis Gates is telling him, Gates spells out just how rare the Africatown legacy is:

"You know, every African American that we know wants to know where in Africa they came from, and then, how they came here," Gates says. "You are the only African American I've ever met who can name the ship."

This story draws on prior reporting from a number of current and past reporters for AL.com and The Press-Register, notably Roy Hoffman and John Sledge. It was updated at 5:05 p.m. Tuesday to fix an incorrect date.