I found this quote in a book about Tuscaloosa history but it also applies to Dothan's story. Buck Baker (1869-1920) is the model for the character of BUCK BANNON in the novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD and Dothan is the model for the town of Aven from the same novel. Most of the innovations which occurred in Tuscaloosa also occurred in Dothan (fictional Aven) but there was a big difference. In 1869 when the revolutionary changes began to arrive in Tuscaloosa, the town was 50 years old and had been Alabama's capital city for 20 years (1826-1846). When the Dothan post office was reactivated in 1872, the area around Dothan was a piney woods wilderness from which a modern city would emerge over a period of only 25 years. 

Here's the quote: "...Innovative new sources of heat, light, power, communications, and clean water would change forever the ideal of what a home should be. The horse would be abandoned as a series of new transportation devices-the trolley, the bicycle, and of course the automobile-took its place.

"This represented more than simply modernizing a city. The collective result of these small changes was a revolution. We often think of revolutions as violent overthrows of governments. But this revolution was more comprehensive, upending  the way people went about their ordinary affairs. Some revolutions can be stopped or reversed, but not this one. Revolutions frequently tend to be quick, but this revolution took a lifetime to complete; however, given its all-inclusive nature, that was a remarkably short time. From 1869 to 1939-threescore and ten years, the Psalmist's estimate of a man's lifespan- Tuscaloosan's lives were utterly transformed.

"Henry Adams-that great historian and man of letters who lived through this same revolution-was said to have concluded that the simpler America of his youth had been closer to the year 1 than to the age of electricity, telephones and automobiles of his maturity. Tuscaloosans would agree."

DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is the story of thirty years (1887-1917) of this revolution and of a solitary man's insatiable desire to exert his power and to control each new innovation that arrived in his adopted hometown.

Page 346 of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD: 

Aven was one of the little miracles of the past thirty years. "That's what it is," Bass Wooten muttered to himself, as he slowly rubbed with a damp cloth the circle a cup of coffee had left on the glassy white counter top in the B. and B. Cafe. "Durned little old chinquapin of a place growed up like a toadstool after a rainy spell."