13 Alabama Border Towns With SECRETS Locals Won't Talk About

In the summer of 1820, a survey crew running Alabama's western state line cut an Alabama town out of Alabama. That town had an Alabama sheriff, an Alabama notary, an Alabama representative and an election precinct set by Alabama law. Then the first results came out with the line about ten miles east of it. Nobody moved, and a whole town woke up in another state. So we're driving all four of Alabama's state lines clockwise, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, then Mississippi, and counting down 13 border towns where the secret is the line itself. There's a Main Street where one curb is Alabama and the other is Tennessee, a mountaintop farm colony whose band played the White House, a corner that missed its own river by about three miles, a welcome for Lafayette that cost more than the state's capitol at Cahaba, a river the Supreme Court gave to Georgia right up to the Alabama bank, a county that stopped short of its own state line on paper for more than 38 years, and a Florida vote to join Alabama. Along the way we stop in Ardmore, Skyline, Bridgeport and Russell Cave, Fruithurst, Lanett, Fort Mitchell, Eufaula, at Ellicott's Stone near Bucks, then Florala, Lockhart, Flomaton, Grand Bay, Gilbertown and Cherokee. You'll meet a stone with a king of Spain on one face, a New York lawyer who became the first woman to serve as a special assistant United States attorney, an oil well drilled after 350 dry holes, and a ferryman who, as the story goes, charged Andrew Jackson $75,000 to cross the Tennessee. The last stop stays in the glovebox until the end. Which state line did your family cross, and what was on the other side worth the trip? WATCH NEXT ▶ Exploring Alabama: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKZr9z2MwI-8 SUBSCRIBE ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-9o1jfKyaASz4am9yTtxNA?sub_confirmation=1 Sister channels: South Carolina Uncovered · Ohio Uncovered · Wisconsin Revealed Historical documentary. Names, dates, and cases are drawn from the public record and published reporting. Some footage is illustrative. Population figures are rounded from 2020 Census counts. #Alabama #AlabamaRevealed #BorderTowns