Russell County was created by the Alabama legislature in December 1832 from land that had been part of the Creeks' ancestral homeland. Girard, now modern Phenix City, on the Chattahoochee River became the first county seat, and in 1834 the seat moved to the more centrally located village of Crockettsville, later Crawford. After the Civil War, new counties were created in eastern Alabama and older ones were reduced in size, and much of northern Russell County became part of Lee County in 1866. Because Crawford then stood on the county's northern edge, officials sought a more central courthouse site and eventually chose Seale, which sat near the center of the redrawn county. Originally called Silver Run, Seale was established in the early 1850s when the developing Mobile and Girard Railroad was expected to pass through the area, though American settlement nearby dated to the early 1830s and a private school serving the small community of Peru had been founded there by 1837. After local completion of work on the Mobile and Girard, the station at Silver Run became known as Seale's Station in honor of Captain Arnold Seale, and the community officially took the name Seale in 1856. By the Civil War, Seale had several businesses and about 350 residents. The Russell County Courthouse was built in 1868 and significantly remodeled in 1908, and it helped define the limits of the Town of Seale, which extended one mile from the building in every direction. In 1935 the county seat moved to Phenix City, leaving the building as a branch courthouse until 1943, when all county government offices moved to Phenix City and the old courthouse closed. The building was later used by the local draft board, the Russell County School District, and various local nonprofit groups, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The area that became Russell County had also played an important role in the Creek War of 1813-14, when several important Creek villages stood within its present borders, especially Coweta, a Creek cultural, governmental, and population center. During that conflict, American forces built Fort Mitchell near the Chattahoochee and Fort Bainbridge near what is now the Russell-Macon County line as supply bases along the Federal Road, a major route linking eastern Georgia with the Mobile area.