Marion Alabama
Marion Alabama
Historic Downtown Marion Alabama is primarily known as the home of Marion Military Institute and Judson College, but those famous schools are but one facet of this history-rich community. Much of Alabama’s Civil War and Civil Rights story was written here.
The City of Marion is a city of diversity. From its people, land, weather, and its location, it is full of balance with the contrasts it provides. The generous rains of the changing seasons feed the streams and creeks that run throughout the city. Coursing through the city is one of America’s last free running wild rivers, The Cahaba, a river that boasts more species of fish than any other in the United States. Marion is filled with public sites, homes, churches, educational centers, halls, and institutes.
Marion Alabama History
Formerly the territory of the Creek Indians, it was founded shortly after 1819 as Muckle Ridge. The city was renamed in honor of Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” hero of the American Revolutionary War, in 1822. It incorporated as a town the same year and also became the second county seat after the hamlet of Perry Ridge was unsuitable. In 1829, it upgraded from a town to a city. From the very early days, Marion created considerable history for a small town on the western frontier of Alabama. The old City Hall (1832) is but one of many antebellum public buildings, churches, and homes in the city today.
General Sam Houston, while between terms as 1st and 3rd President of the Republic of Texas, married Margaret Lea of Marion in the city in 1840.
At the 1844 meeting of the Alabama Baptist State Convention in Marion, the “Alabama Resolutions” were passed. This was one of the factors that led to the 1845 formation of the Southern Baptist Convention in Augusta, Georgia.
Wikipedia contributors, “Marion, Alabama,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marion,_Alabama&oldid=845067884 (accessed July 6, 2018).