Kimberly: Named for a Diamond Mine in South Africa

This small Jefferson County community has worn three names. It began in the eighteen thirties as Kennelsville, built around a stagecoach station that served travelers until eighteen sixty-five. The settlement then went by Jefferson, after a nearby coal mine, until nineteen oh five, when the postal service pointed out that another Alabama town already held that name.

A local man named Milton Doss proposed the solution. He suggested Kimberly, in reference to the famous diamond-mining district of South Africa that was then in the international news. The town adopted the name in nineteen oh five. Coal mines kept the community employed through the nineteen forties before gradually closing in the following decade. The South African diamond fields are a long way from north Jefferson County, but the name stuck and has outlasted the mines that once gave the town its purpose.