Digital Alabama (/series/alabama-ghost-towns)
The Blue Mountain area was settled by the Hudgins family in the late thirties and for years was the terminus of the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad, being the shipping station for the Oxford furnace. During the War, the Confederate Government operated both the railroad and the furnace, the iron being shipped to Selma to make “Ironclads” for the Confederacy. The town was burned in 1864.
Gantt’s Quary had its own post office, which also served as a library. The post was moved from the Quarry to its new location behind the B.B. Comer Museum in Sylacauga.
This old Alabama town was on the banks of the Black Warrior River at Erie Bend near Greensboro.
Erie was once a vibrant town of 1,500 and county seat of Greene County, Alabama – now nothing remains and it is in Hale County
Barnesville Alabama is a ghost town in Marion County, Alabama on State Highway 19.
Arcola Alabama is a ghost town on the Black Warrior River in what is now Hale County, formerly Marengo County, Alabama. Named to honor the French victory during the Battle of Arcola, it was established in the early 1820s by former French Bonapartists as part of their Vine and Olive Colony.
Bellefonte Alabama was incorporated in 1821 with a population of 200 souls and a post office was built sometime after 1822. It was located on the stage line from Knoxville to Huntsville.
For more than seventy years Vienna was a thriving river port on the Tombigbee River in Pickens County, Alabama
The romantic version of the Vine and Olive Colony is based in American mythology about the frontier and the “can-do” spirit of the pioneers. According to folklore, in 1817 exiled French military aristocrats loyal to the recently-deposed Emperor Napoleon founded the Vine and Olive Colony at the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers.
There are several buildings within Cahaba’s city limits that are still intact today, including its Civil War federal prison and a farmhouse built in 1841, although it is long uninhabited.