Saraland: Named for a Minister's Wife

The land that became Saraland started as a Spanish colonial grant and was being settled by squatters as early as eighteen hundred. For much of the nineteenth century it was a rural stretch north of Mobile known as Alvarez Station.

In eighteen ninety-five, a retired minister established the area's first post office and chose a new name, honoring his wife Sara. The community bearing her name would eventually become a city, though not until nineteen fifty-seven, when the northward sprawl of Mobile prompted one hundred twenty-five residents to incorporate rather than be absorbed by their neighbor. Once they did, growth came quickly: by nineteen sixty the population had climbed to nearly forty-six hundred. By the twenty twenty census it stood above sixteen thousand. Saraland today is a substantial Mobile County suburb, though its identity still traces back to a postmaster's devotion and a single deliberate choice not to become part of the city next door.