York, Alabama

York came together from two older communities: a settlement called Old Anvil and a stagecoach stop known as New York Station. When the railroad came through in the eighteen fifties, the stage line name stuck, minus the New. By eighteen sixty-one locals had dropped the New, and the name later shrank to just York. The town formally incorporated on April sixth, eighteen eighty-one.

Sumter County, of which nearby Livingston is the seat, sits in the Black Belt region of Alabama, named for the dark, fertile soil that made it prime cotton country. That agricultural past left a complicated legacy here. York today is a small city of a few thousand people, a quiet county community in the deep western Alabama interior, its early stagecoach and railroad identity long faded into the background of everyday small-town life.