Cuba, Alabama: A Black Belt Cotton Town

The name Cuba turns up on the map of Sumter County before the Civil War, listed as a post office as early as eighteen fifty. That was frontier Alabama, deep in the Black Belt, where the dark soil and enslaved labor built enormous cotton plantations.

In eighteen fifty-two, planter R. A. Clay moved here from Autauga County, bringing one hundred enslaved people to work his new land. A decade later, Clay donated a strip of his property to the Northeast and Southwest Railroad to route a line through the area, a common deal in the antebellum South: give the railroad land, and watch the value of everything around it climb. The post office relocated to the tracks, and Cuba Station grew into simply Cuba. The town incorporated in eighteen ninety with a doctor as its first mayor. Today it sits at the Alabama-Mississippi line, a small community carrying a name that predates its own streets.