Aliceville, AL news and local guide

Aliceville was founded by a railroad builder and named for his wife. The Carrollton Short Line Railroad, authorized in 1897, linked the Mobile and Ohio at Reform with the Pickens County seat, and John Taylor Cochrane of Tuscaloosa completed it in 1902 and then pushed it south toward the Tombigbee River. Buying 36 acres between the villages of Franconia and Bridgeville, he founded Aliceville, named for his wife; a state marker calls her Alyce Searcy, while Wikipedia gives her name as Alice Dearing Cochrane. The first store opened in 1902, tracks reached the depot by 1903, and within a few years the Montgomery Advertiser called it "a town of considerable pretensions," with about a dozen stores and a bank. Aliceville was incorporated in 1907, and the line, renamed the Alabama, Tennessee and Northern, ran until its last train on June 29, 1976.

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During World War II Aliceville held one of the largest prisoner-of-war camps in the country. Construction began in August 1942 on a 400-acre site, the camp was activated on December 12, 1942, and the first prisoners, men of Rommel's Afrika Korps, arrived by train on June 2, 1943. At its peak it held 6,000 German prisoners in some 400 frame buildings, with theaters, chapels, gardens and sports fields inside a barbed-wire compound, and employed 1,000 American military and civilian workers. It closed on September 30, 1945. Sources The Historical Marker Database: Alabama, Tennessee & Northern Railroad Depot; Aliceville Prisoner of War Camp (Alabama Historical Association) Wikipedia: Aliceville, Alabama