Ghost Towns in Alabama
21 documented ghost towns
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History
Alabama's ghost towns tell the story of the Old South, from antebellum river ports to Civil War battlefields. Many towns declined when railroads bypassed river commerce.
Regions: Gulf Coast • Tennessee Valley • Black Belt
All Ghost Towns
Barnsville
Barnsville is a ghost town in Marion County, Alabama that once thrived as a small community with a post office, blacksmith shop, grocery store, and tw...
Battelle
Battelle was a thriving iron mining town at the foot of Lookout Mountain that rose and fell within just five years. Named after Colonel John Gordon Ba...
Beaver Mills
Beaver Mills was a paper mill town in Mobile County that played a surprising role in the Civil War as a Confederate uniform storage depot. The mill's ...
Blakeley
In the 1820s, Blakeley was one of the most promising cities in Alabama. A bustling port town that briefly surpassed Mobile in population. Today it sta...
Boston
Boston, Alabama was a coal mining community in Marion County that lost its identity in 1957 when it was officially merged into the neighboring town of...
Bridgeport
The original Bridgeport died when the railroad chose a different route. A new town grew at the railroad station, leaving the old downtown behind....
Cahaba
Cahaba (Cahawba) was Alabama's first permanent state capital from 1820 to 1825. Today, 'Alabama's most famous ghost town' is preserved as Old Cahawba ...
Carrollton
Carrollton is not a ghost town but a living community famous for one of Alabama's most enduring ghost legends: the 'Face in the Window' at the Pickens...
Centerdale
Centerdale (also spelled Center Dale) is a former unincorporated community in Morgan County, Alabama that appears on ghost town lists. Limited histori...
Claiborne
Once one of the largest and most prosperous towns in early Alabama, Claiborne was a thriving river port on the Alabama River with a peak population of...
Erie
Erie was the first county seat of Greene County and the first incorporated municipality in the county (1820). This thriving cotton port on the Black W...
Manasco
Manasco was a short-lived settlement founded in 1879 by David C. Manasco on 160 acres in Walker County's coal region. The town maintained a post offic...
Old Cahawba
Cahawba was Alabama's first permanent state capital from 1820 to 1826. Flooding and political maneuvering moved the capital to Tuscaloosa. Civil War b...
Old Cahawba
Old Cahawba was ALABAMA'S FIRST STATE CAPITAL (1820-1826)—but flooding doomed it. The capital moved to Tuscaloosa; Cahawba hung on until the Civil War...
Old Ramer
Old Ramer was a thriving local hub from 1850-1895 featuring a sugar mill, hotel, general store, and blacksmith shop. New road construction and the clo...
Pansey
Pansey was a thriving farming community in the late 1800s and early 1900s with stores, a feed mill, cotton gin, two-story schoolhouse, and railroad st...
Pearces Mill
Pearces Mill was a thriving 19th-century mill complex on the Buttahatchee River that included a flour mill, gristmill, cotton gin, sawmill, and genera...
Riverton
Riverton was a Tennessee River trading town that went by three different names before being deliberately flooded by the TVA's Pickwick Landing Dam in ...
St. Stephens
St. Stephens holds the distinction of being Alabama's territorial capital (1817-1819) before Alabama achieved statehood. The site witnessed the first ...
Stanton
Stanton was a railroad community named for superintendent Myron Stanton, with a post office from 1883-2006. It was the site of the Battle of Ebenezer ...
Vienna
Vienna was a prosperous steamboat landing on the Tombigbee River in the Black Prairie cotton belt. Incorporated in 1841, it thrived through the 1850s ...