Twenty Years as Alabama's Capital

Tuscaloosa was Alabama's capital for twenty years, from eighteen twenty-six to eighteen forty-six. The State House stood at the corner of Sixth Street and Twenty-Eighth Avenue. The building is gone now.

What remains is Capitol Park, a small square in downtown Tuscaloosa where the original structure stood, and a historical marker that notes what used to happen there. The capital move mattered. Montgomery was more central in the state, better connected to the cotton plantations of the Black Belt to the south, and the state's commercial and political power had been shifting that direction for years.

When the legislature voted to move in eighteen forty-six, Tuscaloosa lost the economic engine that had driven its growth since incorporation. The town entered what historians describe as a long decline, its population stagnant, its ambitions contracted. Two things helped reverse that.

One was the University of Alabama, which had opened in eighteen thirty-one and which continued to draw students, faculty, and the service economy that surrounds a working college. The other was the Alabama State Hospital for the Insane, established in Tuscaloosa in the eighteen fifties partly because the state needed somewhere to put the institution and the city needed an anchor. By the end of the nineteenth century the river improvements had added a third stabilizing force.

Tuscaloosa never quite became the regional metropolis it might have been had the capital stayed. Birmingham, fifty miles to the northeast, absorbed much of the industrial energy and population growth that nineteenth and twentieth century Alabama generated. Tuscaloosa settled into a different identity: a university town with an industrial base, a city whose defining institutions are a football stadium, a public hospital, and the river.

Those things have been there long enough that Tuscaloosa does not seem like a consolation prize for anything. It seems like what it is.