In 1818, Alabama's first governor carved the capital city of Cahawba out of the wilderness. In less than 50 years, Cahawba grew from a frontier capital full of log cabins to one of America's wealthiest communities, with some of the finest mansions in the state. After the Civil War, it was abandoned, and today it is a ghost town, an important archaeological site, and a place of picturesque ruins. Ironically, in 1818 Cahawba's landscape was also full of ruins, the remains of a village built by prehistoric mound builders who abandoned the site in the 16th century. Looking down Capital Street toward the Alabama River leads directly to the site where an immense earthen mound, centerpiece of the mound-builder village, once stood, the same site Governor Bibb envisioned for Cahawba's statehouse. In 1858, residents used soil from this prehistoric mound to build an embankment for their new railroad. In 1817, surveyor Thomas Freeman, preparing maps for orderly land sales as settlers moved into Alabama's frontier, recorded the ruins of an old abandoned Indian village just below the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama rivers. Though the houses and the semi-circular palisade had long since turned to dust, the ceremonial earthen mound at the town center and the moat surrounding the palisade wall were still visible and were recorded as an American Indian Work. When the federal government granted Governor William Wyatt Bibb land at the confluence of the Cahawba and Alabama rivers for Alabama's seat of government in 1818, the Territorial Assembly authorized him to lay out a town plan. Comparing Bibb's 1818 plat with Freeman's 1817 map shows that Bibb intended to place the statehouse atop the old Indian mound and to surround the capital grounds with the moat dug three centuries earlier, but funding shortages and his untimely death prevented the full realization of that plan.