Kennedy Gun Factory

This was gun country long before the Civil War. The Kennedy long rifle traces to Alexander Kennedy, a gunsmith who introduced his rifle in Philadelphia during the Revolution, then fled to North Carolina when the British invaded. Around the eighteen twenties his son David moved the family trade to the Green Hill community here in Lauderdale County, and Green Hill grew into a cluster of skilled gunmakers, the McDonalds, Garners, Stutts, and others.

The factory built in the eighteen forties was later acquired by Edward Asbury O'Neal, a lawyer who became a Confederate colonel and later governor of Alabama. During the war Federal and Confederate troops occupied the site by turns. A Kennedy descendant later willed the property to Florence, and today it survives as the Kennedy Douglass Center for the Arts.