Old St. Stephens

The story

Old St. Stephens sat on a limestone bluff over the Tombigbee River, an old Spanish post that became an American town after the boundary settlement of 1799. It served as the capital of the Alabama Territory from 1817 to 1819 and saw a run of firsts — among them the territory's first bank and first public school — during a boom that peaked in the early 1800s.

Its decline was quick once the government left. When statehood came in 1819 the capital moved on to Cahaba, and St. Stephens lost its reason to be a seat of power. New shallow-draft boats could pass the river shoals that had made the town a natural transfer point, so the commerce moved upstream, and yellow fever epidemics through the 1820s and 30s drove out much of the rest. Within a generation the town was gone.

Because it was abandoned early and left largely undisturbed for over a century, the site is one of Alabama's richest archaeological assets. It's now Old St. Stephens Historical Park, where the buried town grid, foundations, wells, and cemetery are studied in public digs — the older sibling of Cahawba, Alabama's vanished first state capital downstream.

What remains today

Archaeological foundations, wells, and the old town grid under forest, plus a cemetery and interpretive site — with active public excavations.