Valley, Alabama: Four Mill Villages, One City

The city of Valley, Alabama is technically only in its mid-forties, but its roots go back to just after the Civil War. In eighteen sixty-six two groups of investors formed companies that built twin mills along the Chattahoochee River, Langdale upriver and Riverdale below, launching a string of company towns that would define this bend of the valley for over a century.

Two more mill villages followed in the early nineteen hundreds: Shawmut and Fairfax. For generations all four were operated by the West Point Manufacturing Company, each a self-contained world of mill housing, churches, and company stores. Then in nineteen eighty the four villages voted to merge and incorporated as a single city. They named it Valley, the most straightforward description of where they'd lived all along. The looms are gone, but the grid of mill-era houses still marks where each company town once began and ended.