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The Nature Trail on the campus of LBW was officially named the Barbara L. McClain Community Trail on Friday, Feb. 23.

“Barbara’s story is the American story. She was born to sharecropper parents who worked hard to provide for their five children. She applied the lesson of hard work and perseverance to her own life … and eventually started McClain Contracting, which she co-owned with her son, Kevin, and managed so long as her health permitted,” City of Andalusia Mayor Earl Johnson said.

Barbara was honored in 2009 as Alabama’s U.S. Small Business Administration’s Small Business Person of the Year, and traveled to Washington, D.C., where she testified before the U.S. House Committee on Small Business. She also was invited to meet the President of the United States.

At the time of her death in 2022, she and her husband, Bill, had been married for 57 years. She is remembered as a devoted wife, mother, sister, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
“When Barbara and Bill moved into their home on the Antioch Road in 1980, the Nature Trail on the campus of LBW was only two years old,” Johnson said. “The two of them were regulars on the trail for decades, almost wearing a path from their house to their jumping on point.

“Today, it is especially fitting that Barbara’s name is being added to the trail surrounding LBW,” he said. “It is my hope that young people who hear or read her story will be reminded that while it may be a long road from meager beginnings to unimagined success, that road is paved with hard work, perseverance, and pure determination.”

LBW Community College President Dr. Brock Kelley and County Commission Chairman Greg White also spoke at the naming ceremony. Bill McClain responded for the family.