Hamilton: The Toll Gate That Became a County Seat

Hamilton, the seat of Marion County, has an origin story tied to one of the most important roads in early American history. This site began as a toll gate on Andrew Jackson's Military Road, built between eighteen sixteen and eighteen twenty to connect Nashville to New Orleans. Alabama's legislature established the toll collection point here in eighteen twenty-one to fund the road's upkeep.

The town grew around that gate, and when Captain A. J. Hamilton donated forty acres to formalize it, the town was renamed in his honor.

For more than sixty years, the nearby community of Pikeville served as Marion County's seat. Then in eighteen eighty-two, the county seat moved to Hamilton, following the railroad. The courthouse that replaced the one that burned in eighteen eighty-seven burned down itself, and the third courthouse, built in the early nineteen hundreds, is still in use today.