Eutaw, Alabama: Named for a Revolution

The name Eutaw comes from a Revolutionary War battle. In seventeen eighty-one, General Nathaniel Greene led American forces at the Battle of Eutaw Springs in South Carolina, one of the last major engagements of the war before Yorktown. When Alabama's Greene County was organized in eighteen nineteen, just one day before Alabama became a state, the founders honored Greene by naming the county for him, and the later county seat took its name from his battle.

The county seat moved to Eutaw in eighteen thirty-eight, because Eutaw was more centrally located than the earlier seat at Erie. Eutaw was formally incorporated in eighteen forty-one and grew into a prosperous antebellum market town, serving the cotton economy of the Black Belt. Dozens of its nineteenth-century buildings survive today on the National Register of Historic Places.