Eufaula: A Creek Name on Seven Hundred Antebellum Homes

The name Eufaula belongs to a band of Muscogee people who had lived along the bluffs of the Chattahoochee River for generations before the first Georgia settler arrived in eighteen twenty-three. They called this stretch of high ground home. Within thirteen years of that first settlement, the Creek War of eighteen thirty-six had broken what remained of their claim. State and federal troops marched the Yuchi branch of the Creek Nation west at gunpoint, and the town that rose on their land took their name.

Eufaula grew fast. The Chattahoochee made it a natural river port, and steamboats from New Orleans and Mobile pushed cotton downriver in quantities that made local merchants rich. What distinguished Eufaula from other Alabama river towns was a deliberate choice its wealthiest citizens made: rather than build on the plantation itself, they built in town. Greek Revival columns, Italianate verandas, and Victorian turrets rose side by side on broad, shaded streets that still exist today. The result is the second-largest historic district in Alabama, with more than six hundred and sixty contributing properties on the National Register of Historic Places.

The war came close but did not destroy it. In April eighteen sixty-five, four thousand Union soldiers approached Eufaula from the east. By then both Lee and Johnston had already surrendered their armies, and the soldiers riding toward town knew the fight was over. They passed through without burning.

That survival is the city's defining fact. Eufaula became a kind of preservation accident , so isolated after the war, so economically diminished, that its antebellum fabric simply stayed put. No urban renewal campaign came to clear it. The Shorter Mansion and Fendall Hall and dozens of houses like them endured not because anyone planned to save them, but because no one had the money to replace them.

Today Eufaula's annual pilgrimage tour opens more than fifty historic structures to the public. It is, in a way, the Confederacy's most unguarded confession: this is what the wealth of the Black Belt built, and this is what that wealth cost.