In 1821, the Alabama Legislature selected this site for Alabama's first toll gate at the intersection of the road to Gin Port and Andrew Jackson's Military Road, with Judge John Dabney Terrell Sr., president of the Alabama Senate, serving during the selection. The gate crossed north-south traffic, with a toll house nearby, and travelers paid charges for road upkeep and repair, while the U.S. Mail, people on foot, and those going to mill or preaching passed free. In the 1820's, the toll house also served as a stagecoach rest station on the route between Washington, DC and New Orleans, where a horn signaled the number of passengers needing refreshment. The intersection stood on Chickasaw hunting grounds about 1 mile north of three Chickasaw mounds on the Buttahatchee River, and the surrounding community became known as Toll Gate. William Ragsdale settled the area around 1818, a post office opened in 1838, and by the 1840's Military Ford south of the river was considered part of Toll Gate. Pikeville, seven miles south, was the county seat until Lamar County was established in 1868; because Pikeville lay close to the new county line, a new county seat was chosen, and Centre, six miles north of Toll Gate, won the election as plans began for a seat called Popeville. Captain Albert J. Hamilton, Judge Terrell's son-in-law, later petitioned the Alabama legislature for another county seat election, and Toll Gate won the site election in 1881. Hamilton gave 40 acres from his Toll Gate farm to be sold in lots to fund construction of a new courthouse, and the new town was named Hamilton in his honor. The county court moved there in 1882 while the town was still under construction, and that same year the Toll Gate post office was moved to Hamilton and renamed. Over about 60 years, a toll complex evolved into the seat of county government about three miles north of the original site. The nearby Chickasaw burial mounds later became Judge Terrell's final resting place, and the former toll house and stage station eventually became the Bolin House before it was demolished in the 1970's; timbers rescued from a 1974 cleanup fire included one partially burned piece now displayed at the Nix Library in Hamilton.