Fort Payne, Cherokee Removal, Socks, and a Band

Fort Payne sits in a valley in DeKalb County, tucked against the western edge of Lookout Mountain in northeastern Alabama. The name comes from a stockade built in eighteen thirty-eight during the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homelands in the southeastern United States. The fort was a holding place, one of the collection points where Cherokee families were gathered under military guard before being marched west to Indian Territory along what became known as the Trail of Tears.

After removal, the valley that the Cherokee had farmed and named was opened to white settlement. A town grew gradually through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, took the fort's name, and incorporated in eighteen eighty-nine. The town's early economy was agricultural, then shifted in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties as the boom psychology of the New South spread through the Alabama highlands.

By the nineteen twenties, Fort Payne had discovered an unlikely industrial identity: hosiery manufacturing. The town's proximity to cotton-growing regions, available water, and inexpensive labor made it suitable for knitting mills. By the nineteen eighties and nineties, Fort Payne was producing more socks than any other city on earth, a fact so improbable that the town used it as an actual marketing slogan: the Sock Capital of the World.

Then there is the band. The country group Alabama formed in Fort Payne in nineteen sixty-nine, and for about fifteen years beginning in the early nineteen eighties, they were the most commercially successful act in country music history. Their run of number-one singles through the decade was unmatched, and Fort Payne built a small museum to them.

The hosiery industry largely departed when manufacturing moved offshore in the early two thousands, but the band and the mountain and the valley remain.