Cahaba, the capital the rivers took back

The state capital for five years, emptied by the river it was built on

Cahaba sits where the Cahaba River flows into the Alabama, in Dallas County, on ground that once held a large village of Mississippian mound builders. The name is thought to come from two Choctaw words meaning "water above," or from a Creek word for the native cane that covered the valleys. In November 1818 Governor William Wyatt Bibb, having secured a free federal land grant there, persuaded the territorial assembly to make "Cahawba" the permanent seat of government. His opponents, who wanted Tuscaloosa, struck back at the 1819 constitutional convention with a clause letting the legislature move the capital after 1825.

For a few years Cahaba boomed. The town was laid out on a grid modelled on Philadelphia, its north-south streets named for trees and its east-west streets for famous men, around a two-storey brick capitol believed to have worn a copper dome. Lots bought at $1.25 an acre sold within weeks for $60 to $70. By 1821 the town had about 1,000 people, more than Montgomery, with a state bank, hotels, two ferries and two newspapers. In 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette came up the river on the steamboat Anderson to a ceremonial arch, ringing bells and a ball, and the state spent about $17,000 entertaining him, more than it had spent on the capitol.

The rivers were Cahaba's undoing. Bibb had died in 1820 after a fall from his horse, and in 1825 Tuscaloosa's backers, pointing to the floods and the fevers of the lowland site, carried a bill moving the capital, effective 1 February 1826. The town rebounded on Black Belt cotton in the 1840s and 1850s, with mansions, a women's school, Saltmarsh Hall for its balls and, from 1859, a railroad. Then the Civil War took the rails for the Confederacy, and a cotton warehouse on the riverbank became Castle Morgan, a prison that held more than 3,000 Union soldiers; in February 1865 a great flood swept through it. In 1866 the county seat went to Selma. Houses and churches were taken apart and carried off, the population fell to a few hundred, most of them freedpeople who held Radical Republican meetings in the empty courthouse, and by 1900 Cahaba was a ghost town, its bricks building houses in Selma.

The Alabama Historical Commission has looked after the site since 1975 as the Old Cahawba Archaeological Park. Visitors walk the deserted streets past the Perine Well, once the deepest artesian well in the world, collapsed cellars, chimney ruins, slave quarters, old cemeteries, the foundation of the prison and the Crocheron columns, the best-known relic of the vanished mansions. St. Luke's Episcopal Church, moved away in 1878, has been brought home.