Background
Noah Bartlett Cloud was born on January 26, 1809 at Edgefield, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of Noah and Margaret (Sweringen) Cloud.
Noah Bartlett Cloud was born on January 26, 1809 at Edgefield, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of Noah and Margaret (Sweringen) Cloud.
Cloud prepared himself at Philadelphia for the practise of medicine.
Cloud's father having died in 1838 and he set out for Alabama in 1846. He made his new home at La Place, Macon County, and became a cotton planter of the Black Belt. He immediately took an active interest in the Chunnenugga Horticultural Society of Macon County, one of the oldest organizations of its kind in the Southwest. In 1852, at a convention in Macon, Georgia, held for the purpose of forming an agricultural society for the Cotton States, Cloud and a group of Alabama friends decided to establish an agricultural monthly at Montgomery. The first number of the American Cotton Planter accordingly appeared in January 1853. In 1857 the magazine was combined with the Soil of the South and continued its career until the war put an end to its existence in 1861.
During the Civil War, he served as a surgeon in the Confederate army. In 1868 he was elected superintendent of public instruction in Alabama under the carpet-bag government. In this capacity, it became his duty to establish a system of free schools for the state, including schools for the African Americans. It is not surprising that Cloud was the object of much local hostility, for the carpet-bag administration was thoroughly honeycombed with corruption. That his work was not on a higher level than that of his associates is shown by the fact that the judiciary committee of the carpet-bag Senate accused him of malfeasance in office. Failing of relection in 1870, he passed from the public view, and died at Montgomery in 1875, unnoticed by the community in which he had spent the active years of his life.
Cloud opposed secession.
Cloud was the member of the Chunnenugga Horticultural Society of Macon County.
Cloud was married to Mary M. Barton, of Edgefield.