Wetumpka's history spans from a meteor impact about 85 million years ago that created a five-mile-wide crater during the age of the dinosaurs to a long sequence of notable events from 1714 through 2019. In 1714, at the invitation of the Creeks and with permission from the King of France, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville sent an expedition up the Alabama River to begin building Fort Toulouse, completed in 1717. William Bartram traveled through in 1775, cataloguing flora and fauna and describing its native people, and in 1814 Red Stick leader William Weatherford surrendered to Andrew Jackson at nearby Fort Jackson, leading to the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Wetumpka was incorporated in 1834, was praised in 1836 as one of the West's most promising cities, completed its first state penitentiary in 1841, and saw Horace King build a covered bridge there in 1844. Elmore County was created in 1866 and Wetumpka became its county seat, while the great flood of 1886 destroyed King's bridge and shifted businesses from the west side of the river to the east. Later milestones included Lock 31 in 1896, Florence Golson Bateman's rise from childhood blindness to musical distinction, Frances Golson becoming Alabama's first female newspaper editor in 1916, the 1925 construction of the Elmore County Training School for African American students, the 1931 Bibb Graves Bridge, the 1932 courthouse, John Kelly Fitzpatrick's role in creating the Dixie Art Colony in 1933, and Jessie Welch Austin becoming Alabama's first female sheriff in 1939. In the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Wetumpka was linked to Admiral Charles McMorris and the USS McMorris in 1960, the W. B. Doby school in 1963, Hall of Fame baseball player Joseph Wheeler Sewell and chief federal judge William Benson Bryant in 1977, the USS Crommelin in 1983, film productions including The Grass Harp, The Rosa Parks Story, Big Fish, and Son of the South, the 1996 Olympic flame at Jasmine Hill Gardens and Outdoor Museum, George Smoot III's 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, the 2017 Tulotoma Snail Trail, and other civic and cultural achievements.