Saint Stephens, AL news and local guide

In 1803 the federal government opened a land office and the Choctaw trading house at St. Stephens, and George Strother Gaines, who ran the Choctaw Agency from 1805, built what may have been the first brick building put up by Americans in Alabama in 1811. The territorial legislature chartered the town on January 8, 1807, and renamed it Saint Stephens, from the Spanish San Estevan, in an amended charter of December 18, 1811. When Mississippi became a state in 1817, St. Stephens became the capital of the new Alabama Territory until 1819, and by then it had more than 500 homes. It claimed many Alabama firsts, including the first bank, the Tombeckbe Bank, the first school, Washington Academy, the first steamboat and the first theater. The capital soon moved on, and old St. Stephens faded, much as the preacher Lorenzo Dow had predicted when he warned it would become a "roosting place for bats and owls." In 1848 Washington County moved its seat to "new" St. Stephens, where a courthouse built in 1853 and 1854 served until the seat moved to Chatom in 1907. The old town site is now preserved as a historical park. Sources The Historical Marker Database: Site of Old St. Stephens; St. Stephens (Alabama Centennial Commission); St. Stephens Courthouse and Masonic Lodge (Alabama Historical Commission) Wikipedia: St. Stephens, Alabama