Clanton: Goose Pond to Peach Capital

The town that became Clanton started life in eighteen sixty-eight as Goose Pond, a Louisville and Nashville Railroad stop. Alfred Baker founded it the same year Chilton County was carved from surrounding territory, and the county was briefly named Baker County in his honor. The county seat moved here from Grantville in eighteen seventy-one after a courthouse fire, and the same year the town was renamed Clanton, for Confederate General James Holt Clanton.

A century later the area found a gentler identity: Chilton County peach orchards began producing the majority of Alabama's crop after World War Two. Clanton took over the Peach Festival in nineteen fifty-two and has held it ever since. The water tower painted like a peach tells you everything you need to know.