Claiborne, the Lost River City

On the bluff above the Alabama River once stood one of this region's first real towns. It began in late eighteen thirteen as a stockade called Fort Claiborne, thrown up by troops under General Ferdinand Leigh Claiborne as a base in the Creek War. A town grew around the fort, and in eighteen nineteen it became the seat of Monroe County.

Through the eighteen thirties Claiborne boomed. By some accounts its population approached five thousand, with two large hotels, a cotton warehouse, stores, a jail, a school, and churches, and it counted three future governors among its residents. But yellow fever, the Civil War, and Reconstruction wore it down. When the new railroad through Monroe County bypassed Claiborne in the early nineteen hundreds, its fate was sealed. Today it is a ghost town, remembered mostly by this marker and an annual pilgrimage.