The River That Named a City

The river named this city. Long before Europeans arrived, the Black Warrior River ran through the heart of Mississippian territory, and a paramount chief who ruled dozens of villages along its banks carried a title that translated, in the western Muskogean tongue, as Black Warrior. When Spanish explorers came through in fifteen forty, they recorded his name as Tuskaloosa.

Nearly three centuries later, settlers planted a small cluster of log cabins at the fall line where the river dropped off the highland plateau, and they named their town in his honor. When Alabama became a state in eighteen nineteen, the territorial legislature incorporated the settlement the very day before Congress admitted Alabama to the Union. The town's spelling drifted over the decades from Tuskaloosa to Tuscaloosa, the shift completed by the early nineteen hundreds, but the meaning stayed the same.

For twenty years Tuscaloosa served as Alabama's capital. The State House stood at the corner of Sixth Street and Twenty-Eighth Avenue, in what is now Capitol Park. The University of Alabama opened its doors in eighteen thirty-one, four years before the campus streets were laid.

By eighteen forty-six the legislature had moved the capital east to Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa entered a long quiet stretch that the state hospital, the university, and eventually the locks and dams on the Black Warrior River would slowly reverse. The river itself threads through the city's northern edge. Its waters flow one hundred seventy-eight miles to the Tombigbee and on to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Army Corps of Engineers began damming and locking it in the eighteen eighties, turning an unreliable frontier waterway into a commercial corridor that carried coal and steel down to Mobile. That transformation connected Tuscaloosa to the industrial South, and the city has been trading on the river, the university, and the name ever since.