Digital Alabama (/series/alabama-ghost-towns/page/2)
Ghost towns in Alabama are a popular subject for more reasons than you may think. For instance, it is often required that we survey an abandoned property or ghost town in order to recreate a past event in order to help determine if the event could have actually occured as described in old newspaper articles or testimony of witnesses.
Louina Alabama was settled by the Indians, pushed to Alabama by the white settlers from the overcrowded east in the 1830s. Louina’s trading post quickly became the metropolis of its day with the area producing quantities of gold. Today Louina is a ghost town.
According to tradition and folklore, the Louina area coughed up gold and silver.
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.
Claiborne is a ghost town on a bluff above the Alabama River in Monroe County, Alabama.
Situated near the Federal Road, Claiborne began during the Mississippi Territory period with a ferry over the river.
Battelle Alabama was a thriving mining community at the turn of the century, having spread out to the base of Lookout Mountain, five miles north of Valley Head, Alabama. Now, the forest has taken over, and no buildings remain in what was Battelle. Ruins include scattered bricks, rotted lumber, and a few pieces of metal.
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.
The Buck Creek Mill (originally Selma Cotton Mill, then Siluria Cotton Mill) was a large textile mill founded in 1896, built on Buck Creek in Siluria in Shelby County. The main section of the mill building was completed in 1904, with additions in 1906 and 1911, when it took its best-known name.
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.
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.