The City of Eufaula

The Second Creek War resulted in the final expulsion of the Creeks from eastern Alabama and paved the way for large-scale American settlement. In the years after the war, the town of Irwinton gradually expanded westward from the bluff overlooking the Chattahoochee and by the 1840s had become a thriving and rapidly growing community. The young city featured fine homes, several churches, schools, businesses, and a newspaper office, and prominent local architect George W. Whipple built many of these structures. Most of the area of modern downtown Eufaula was developed by the 1840s. As Broad Street became the city's primary thoroughfare, older wooden buildings closer to the river were gradually replaced by more substantial brick structures nearer the intersection with Eufaula Avenue, and these sections became known locally as Rotten Row and Brick Row. Within the decade, Eufaula completed its transition from a frontier community to one of Alabama's primary trading centers. Steamboats landed at Eufaula as early as 1828, and by the 1840s the city had become a leading regional river transportation center. Wagons brought cotton from plantations and farms more than fifty miles away for shipment, and thousands of bales were sent by steamboat to Apalachicola on the Gulf of Mexico and onward to ports such as New York and Liverpool. Steamers traveling upriver from the Gulf carried a wide array of goods for the growing markets in the Eufaula area. In 1843, the community of Irwinton reclaimed its original name of Eufaula through an act of the Alabama legislature, officially because of popular affection for the original name, though local legend held that the change followed repeated misdirection of mail to Irwinton, Georgia.

Eufaula, Alabama · United States