Old Cahawba, Alabama: The First State Capital the Rivers Drowned Out

Cahawba — the spelling later standardized as Cahaba — was laid out beginning in 1819 by Governor William Wyatt Bibb at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers in Dallas County, and by 1820 was functioning as the first permanent capital of the new state of Alabama. The site was chosen for its central location and river access, but the very feature that made it a natural port also made it dangerously prone to flooding, a defect that shadowed the town from its earliest years.

The town grew quickly as the seat of state government, with a statehouse, public buildings, and a grid of streets laid out on an ambitious plan. Its tenure as capital was brief: persistent flooding — the rivers reached the town’s outskirts as early as 1822 — combined with political maneuvering, led the legislature to vote in January 1826 to move the seat of government to Tuscaloosa, only about six years after Cahawba was established. The loss of the capital was an early and serious blow to a town that had been planned around its role as the center of state affairs.

Cahawba did not die with the loss of the capital. Through the antebellum decades it reinvented itself as a prosperous cotton-shipping town on the river, a major distribution point for cotton floated down the Alabama River to the Gulf port of Mobile. The arrival of a railroad in 1859 sparked a building boom; the 1860 census recorded roughly 2,000 residents — about two-thirds of them enslaved African Americans — and on the eve of the Civil War the population approached three thousand. During the war the town became the site of Castle Morgan, a Confederate prison housed in a converted cotton warehouse that held more than 3,000 captured Union soldiers by March 1865, sixfold its intended capacity, and the town’s name became associated with the suffering recorded there.

After the war the foundations of Cahawba’s prosperity collapsed. The destruction of the plantation cotton economy, a devastating flood in February 1865, the relocation of the Dallas County seat to Selma in 1866, and the departure of much of the population left the town in steep decline — only 431 people remained by 1870. By the early 1900s Cahawba was largely abandoned; most of its buildings were gone by 1903, dismantled, moved, or left to decay. Today the site is preserved as Old Cahawba Archaeological Park, managed by the Alabama Historical Commission, where street grids, cemeteries, ruins, and foundations survive among interpretive trails as one of the South’s most significant abandoned-town sites.