Millbrook: Pure Water Country

Before European settlers arrived, this stretch of central Alabama was part of a landscape the Muscogee had worked for generations. By eighteen eighteen a planter and politician named Bolling Hall had built Ellerslie, the first permanent home in what would become Millbrook.

The surrounding county, Autauga, was formally established that same year, its name drawn from an earlier Creek village called Atagi, whose name roughly translates as pure water. Millbrook itself straddles the Autauga and Elmore county lines and grew gradually through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a community near the Alabama state capital. Today it is one of the more populous cities in Autauga County, a quiet testament to eighteen eighteen, when planters and surveyors were just beginning to map this land as their own.