98 Fun Facts About Alabama

Alabama's nickname, the Yellowhammer State, comes from what?

A Civil War regiment's uniform: Alabama soldiers whose uniforms showed yellow like the bird's feathers were dubbed yellowhammers, and the name spread from the troops to the whole state.

Which nickname has been printed on Alabama's licence plates since the 1950s?

Heart of Dixie went onto the plates by law: a 1951 act ordered every Alabama tag to carry the words beside a small heart, and both are still there.

Which northern city hosted Alabama's 1819 constitutional convention?

Huntsville hosted the convention and then served as Alabama's first capital, but only briefly: the seat of government moved south the following year.

Which Alabama city, the state's oldest, was founded in 1702 as capital of French Louisiana?

Mobile claims America's oldest Mardi Gras, first celebrated in 1703, fifteen years before New Orleans was even founded.

Which flower replaced goldenrod as Alabama's official state flower in 1959?

Camellia took the title from goldenrod, a native wildflower, although the camellia itself is an import from East Asia; the law was later narrowed to one species, Camellia japonica.

Which city served as Alabama's capital from 1826 to 1846?

Tuscaloosa lost the seat to Montgomery in 1846 as the state's population shifted; its abandoned capitol became a women's college, burned in 1923 and survives as ruins in a park.

Montgomery was the first capital of what?

The Confederate States of America was organised in Montgomery in February 1861 and kept its capital there until the government moved to Richmond, Virginia, that May.

Which state borders Alabama to the south?

Florida's Panhandle runs along almost the whole of Alabama's southern edge, leaving Alabama only a short strip of Gulf coast in its southwestern corner.

What is the highest natural point in Alabama?

Mount Cheaha, about 2,400 feet high, is topped by Bunker Tower, a stone lookout built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.

The Alabama people, who gave the state its name, lived where which two rivers meet to form the Alabama River?

Coosa and Tallapoosa: the French built Fort Toulouse at the fork of those rivers in 1717 to counter British influence among the tribes living there.

Which explorer's 1540 expedition produced the first written versions of the name Alabama?

Hernando de Soto's chroniclers wrote the name as Alibamu, Alibamo and Limamu; he had come hunting for gold, and died of fever beside the Mississippi River two years later.

Alabama's 1901 constitution, replaced in 2022, was widely described as the world's what?

Longest constitution: the 1901 text left counties so little power that even local matters needed amendments, and the hundreds added over a century made it the longest in the world.

Which 26-year-old pastor was elected to lead the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955?

Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen partly because he was new in town: as Rosa Parks put it, he had not been in Montgomery long enough to make strong friends or enemies.

Which 15-year-old was arrested for keeping her Montgomery bus seat, before Rosa Parks?

Claudette Colvin was arrested nine months before Parks; movement leaders chose not to build their case around a teenager, yet she became a plaintiff in the lawsuit that ended bus segregation.

The 'Bloody Sunday' attack on the first Selma to Montgomery march happened on which structure?

On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and a mounted posse charged about 600 unarmed marchers on March 7, 1965; the Voting Rights Act followed that August.

Which Alabama governor famously resisted federal desegregation demands in the 1960s?

George Wallace, governor from 1963, made his 'Stand in the Schoolhouse Door' at the University of Alabama in June 1963 to block two Black students from enrolling.

Who designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, a black granite table with water flowing over it?

Maya Lin, already famous for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, took the flowing water from a line in the 'I Have a Dream' speech about justice rolling down like waters.

Helen Keller, born in Tuscumbia, lost her sight and hearing from illness at what age?

19 months: an illness in early 1882 left Helen Keller deaf and blind; she met teacher Anne Sullivan in March 1887 at her Tuscumbia home, Ivy Green.

Booker T. Washington became the first leader of which Alabama school in 1881?

Tuskegee Institute opened on July 4, 1881, in a room lent by a church, with 30 students; Washington later had the students make the bricks and put up the campus buildings themselves.

The Tuskegee Airmen's escort fighters earned a nickname from which part being painted red?

Tails: the 332nd Fighter Group painted them red so that its fighters stood out from other escort groups in the big formations, and the pilots became the Red Tails.

Which NASA centre, established in Alabama in 1960, designed the Saturn V Moon rocket?

Marshall Space Flight Center's first director was Wernher von Braun, who had built V-2 rockets for Nazi Germany before the US Army put his team to work in Alabama.

Which Birmingham landmark made pig iron for nearly ninety years and is now an industrial museum?

Sloss Furnaces went cold in the early 1970s and faced demolition until 1977, when Birmingham put up about $3 million to preserve the site as a museum of industry.

Which Alabama city is nicknamed 'The Peanut Capital of the World'?

Dothan sits at the heart of one of the world's biggest peanut-growing regions and celebrates the harvest each autumn with the National Peanut Festival, first held in 1938.

Enterprise, Alabama, put up a monument in 1919 to thank which crop-destroying insect?

The boll weevil wiped out the cotton and pushed farmers into peanuts, which paid so well that the grateful town put up a statue to the pest that had forced the change.

Birmingham's giant Vulcan, its city symbol, holds which world record?

Largest cast iron statue in the world, the 56-foot Vulcan was cast from local iron for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair as an advertisement for Birmingham's young iron industry.

Birmingham boomed so quickly after its founding in 1871 that it earned which nickname?

The Magic City seemed to spring up overnight because iron ore, coal and limestone, the three raw materials of steel, all lay close at hand.

Which carmaker opened Alabama's first auto plant near Vance in 1997?

Mercedes opened its Vance plant in 1997, building the ML320 SUV; Honda followed in Lincoln in 2001 and Hyundai in Montgomery in 2005.

Talladega Superspeedway holds what distinction on the NASCAR calendar?

Longest oval on the NASCAR schedule at 2.66 miles, Talladega is so fast that after Bobby Allison's car flew into the catch fence in 1987, NASCAR fitted restrictor plates to slow the cars.

Which Alabama football coach won six national championships between 1961 and 1979?

Bear Bryant earned his nickname as a teenager, when he took up a showman's offer of a dollar a minute to wrestle a bear.

The Alabama-Auburn football rivalry is better known by what name?

The Iron Bowl takes its name from Birmingham's iron industry; the game was played at the city's Legion Field every year from 1948 to 1988.

Alabama native Hank Aaron's 715th home run in 1974 broke whose career record?

Babe Ruth's 714 fell on April 8, 1974, when Aaron homered off the Dodgers' Al Downing; the new record holder had started out in the Negro leagues, with the Indianapolis Clowns.

Which Olympic sprint champion was born in Oakville, Alabama, in 1913?

Jesse Owens was a sharecropper's son known as J.C.; the story goes that after the family moved to Cleveland, a teacher misheard his Southern drawl and wrote down 'Jesse'.

What is the fictional town in To Kill a Mockingbird called?

Maycomb is modelled on Harper Lee's home town of Monroeville, where a volunteer cast stages the story each spring at the old county courthouse.

Which writer was Harper Lee's childhood neighbour in Monroeville and the inspiration for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird?

Truman Capote spent childhood summers in Monroeville beside the Lees; in 1959 she went with him to Kansas to help research the murders behind In Cold Blood.

'Sweet Home Alabama' by Lynyrd Skynyrd was written in response to songs by which musician?

Neil Young's 'Southern Man' and 'Alabama' provoked the reply, which names him; none of its three writers came from Alabama, and Young later wrote that his own song deserved the jab.

Which singer, who began as a jazz pianist, was born in Montgomery in 1919?

Nat King Cole left Montgomery for Chicago at four; when he came back to Alabama as a star, white men stormed the stage in Birmingham and knocked him down in mid-concert.

The country band Alabama formed in 1969 in which town in the state's northeast?

Fort Payne cousins Randy Owen, Teddy Gentry and Jeff Cook started playing together in 1969, spent years working for tips at a Myrtle Beach bar as Wildcountry, and became Alabama in 1977.

Which film's hero grows up in fictional Greenbow, Alabama?

Forrest Gump is set largely in Alabama but was filmed mainly around Beaufort, South Carolina; Greenbow exists only in the story.

Which river forms the southern half of Alabama's border with Georgia?

The Chattahoochee belongs to Georgia all the way across: an 1860 Supreme Court ruling put the state line on the river's western bank, so Alabama starts at the shore.

Which is Alabama's official state tree?

Longleaf pine needs fire to reproduce; logging and fire suppression have cut its stands to less than a tenth of the range they covered when Europeans arrived.

Alabama's state flag, adopted in 1895, shows what design?

A crimson cross of St. Andrew on white is all the 1895 law describes; it never fixed the flag's shape, so square and oblong versions both flew until a 1987 legal opinion settled on a rectangle.

Which county is Alabama's largest by total area?

Baldwin County is older than Alabama itself: it was created in 1809, a decade before statehood, and named for Abraham Baldwin, a senator from Georgia.

Which admiral is said to have cried 'Damn the torpedoes!' off Alabama in 1864?

David Farragut's 'torpedoes' at Mobile Bay were moored mines: one had just sunk the ironclad USS Tecumseh when he ordered his fleet on through the minefield.

What made the crescent of hills at Wetumpka, Alabama, some 80 million years ago?

A meteorite impact was long suspected at Wetumpka, but proof came only in the late 1990s, when a core drilled at the crater's centre brought up minerals deformed by a sudden, massive shock.

Auburn University's battle cry is 'War Eagle', but what are its teams officially called?

The Tigers have carried that name since Auburn's first football game in 1892; 'War Eagle' is only the battle cry, though a live eagle does circle the stadium before home games.

Which planemaker opened its first US airliner assembly line on Alabama's Gulf coast in 2015?

Airbus first hoped to build Air Force tankers there; when that contract went to Boeing in 2011, it built an airliner plant on the same former air base and delivered its first jet in 2016.

Which spot in Fairhope is the highest coastline point between Maine and Mexico?

Alabama's other natural wonders include DeSoto Caverns, the first officially recorded cave in the US, and Noccalula Falls.

About two-thirds of Alabama's land is covered by what?

Forest covers some 22 to 23 million acres of Alabama, about two-thirds of the land in a state whose old nickname is the Cotton State.

Which car part did Alabama's Mary Anderson patent in 1903 after seeing a driver struggle through New York snow?

Windshield wiper blades were her answer to a driver who kept stopping to clear the glass by hand. Firms she offered the patent to said it had no commercial value.

Which milestone in American telephone history took place in the small town of Haleyville, Alabama, in February 1968?

The first 911 call was made by Alabama House speaker Rankin Fite and answered by Congressman Tom Bevill. A small local phone firm had raced to beat AT&T to it.

Alabama's state fossil, Basilosaurus, has a name meaning king lizard but was really which kind of animal?

A whale of the Eocene seas, Basilosaurus kept its reptile name because scientists first took its huge bones for a giant lizard's.

Which best-selling toy did Alabama-born engineer Lonnie Johnson dream up while testing a heat pump?

Super Soaker sales reached $200 million in 1991 alone. Johnson's day job at NASA had him helping to power the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Which British band recorded Brown Sugar and Wild Horses at Alabama's Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in December 1969?

The Rolling Stones needed only three days there, though both songs waited until the 1971 album Sticky Fingers to reach the public.

Northern Alabama's white barbecue sauce, traditionally served on smoked chicken, is built on which ingredient?

Mayonnaise is sharpened with vinegar and black pepper, and the smoked birds are dunked into the sauce straight from the pit.

Which landmark federal law did the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, help push through Congress?

Voting Rights Act passage came within months: President Johnson asked Congress for it on live television eight days after marchers were beaten in Selma.

Which astronaut born in Decatur, Alabama, became the first Black woman to reach orbit on a 1992 shuttle flight?

Mae Jemison left Alabama for Chicago as a child and worked as a Peace Corps doctor in West Africa before she flew on Endeavour.

Which 1992 comedy sends a brash New York lawyer to defend two students accused of murder in Alabama?

My Cousin Vinny won Marisa Tomei an Oscar. Its writer got stuck in the mud in Butler, Alabama, on a research trip and put the mishap in the script.

Alabama's state bird, known locally as the yellowhammer, belongs to which family of birds?

Woodpeckers by family, yellowhammers are northern flickers, which unusually for their kind feed mostly on the ground rather than in the trees.

What did Martin Luther King Jr. begin writing in a newspaper's margins while jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963?

An open letter to eight white Alabama clergymen who had criticised his protests, it was continued on scraps of paper from a jail trusty and carried out piece by piece by his lawyers.

Which US Secretary of State, successor to Colin Powell in 2005, was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama?

Condoleezza Rice became the first Black woman to hold the post. Her father was a Presbyterian minister and a college dean.

Which technology boss, raised in Robertsdale, Alabama, took over Apple from Steve Jobs in 2011?

Tim Cook studied industrial engineering at Auburn University, then spent twelve years at IBM before a brief stop at Compaq led him to Apple.

Which country music legend, born in Butler County, Alabama, died aged 29 on New Year's Day 1953?

Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car on the way to a concert in Ohio. In 2010 his songwriting earned a posthumous Pulitzer citation.

Which teacher arrived at the Keller family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1887 to teach their daughter Helen?

Anne Sullivan was nearly blind herself after a childhood eye infection. Within half a year she had taught her pupil 575 words by spelling them into her palm.

Which group of 1961 civil rights activists had their Greyhound bus firebombed by a mob outside Anniston, Alabama?

Freedom Riders all escaped the burning bus alive. They were riding interstate buses to test whether the South obeyed court rulings against segregated travel.

Which mountain range of eastern North America reaches its southern end in the hills of central Alabama?

Appalachian Mountains ridges run roughly 2,050 miles from Newfoundland, and their last southern spur holds Alabama's highest ground.

Montgomery, Alabama, became the first US city to install which form of public transport citywide in 1886?

Electric streetcars took over from the city's horse-drawn cars, and the speedy new network was nicknamed the Lightning Route.

The phrase Stars Fell on Alabama, added to the state's licence plates in 2002, recalls which 1833 event?

A meteor shower, the Leonids of November 1833, sent thousands of shooting stars across the sky in one night. A 1934 jazz standard later made the phrase famous.

Which actress plays a New York socialite heading home for a divorce in the 2002 film Sweet Home Alabama?

Reese Witherspoon's Melanie needs her childhood sweetheart to sign the papers before she can marry the son of New York's mayor.

Which 1991 film, set around a railway café in Whistle Stop, Alabama, came from a novel by Birmingham-born Fannie Flagg?

Fried Green Tomatoes borrowed its café from a real one in Irondale, a suburb near the author's birthplace, which her aunt ran for four decades.

Which Friends star, born in Birmingham, Alabama, was pulled on stage in Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark video?

Courteney Cox was chosen for the 1984 video by its director, Brian De Palma, ten years before her sitcom made her a household name.

The oldest organised celebration of which festival in the United States began on Alabama's Gulf coast in 1703?

Mardi Gras was being celebrated by French settlers on the Alabama coast fifteen years before New Orleans was founded. The masked balls, parades and floats began there too.

Which kind of Second World War warship is the USS Alabama, saved from scrap partly by children's nickels and dimes?

Battleship Alabama was headed for the breakers until the state's children raised about $100,000 from lunch money and allowances. She later doubled as a film set for Under Siege.

Which Jazz Age novel's author met his wife, Zelda Sayre, at a country club in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama?

The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald was an army officer garrisoned at Camp Sheridan, just outside the city, when the pair met in July 1918.

Who opened one of the world's earliest flying schools in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1910?

The Wright brothers sent Orville to do the teaching himself, and the field he flew from grew into Maxwell Air Force Base.

Alabama's 2003 state quarter, which shows Helen Keller, was the first circulating US coin to feature what?

Braille spells out Helen Keller's name on the coin beside the ordinary lettering, above a banner that reads Spirit of Courage.

Which future US president defeated the Red Stick Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in present-day Alabama in 1814?

Andrew Jackson's victory ended the Creek War, and the treaty that followed forced the Creeks to hand over 23 million acres.

Which actress, born in Montgomery, Alabama, played the outspoken maid Minny in the 2011 film The Help?

Octavia Spencer won an Oscar for the part, and her own mother had worked as a maid. She landed her first screen role by asking to audition while working on a film's casting crew.

Which nickname stuck to the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the Alabama session band that backed Aretha Franklin?

The Swampers so mastered Southern soul that Black artists who came to record with them were often astonished to find the studio musicians were white.

Which actor won an Oscar as the Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch in the 1962 film of To Kill a Mockingbird?

Gregory Peck took a part first slated for Rock Hudson, and prepared by travelling to Alabama to meet the novelist's father.

Which nut, the fruit of a species of hickory, has been Alabama's official state nut since 1982?

Pecan trees held the title for forty years before the peanut got a look in: Alabama made that its official state legume only in 2022.

Which rock quarried at Sylacauga, Alabama, forms the translucent ceiling of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington?

Marble from Sylacauga has been called the world's whitest. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum said its fine texture let him show the kindness in Lincoln's face.

Which Alabama town, birthplace of the novel's author, stages To Kill a Mockingbird plays in its old county courthouse?

Monroeville's courthouse had such poor acoustics that Hollywood copied it on a backlot for the 1962 film, so well that many Alabamians thought it was shot there.

Birmingham, Alabama, grew up where ore, limestone and which other steelmaking ingredient all lay close together?

Coal completed a trio found side by side almost nowhere else on Earth, and the city was laid out in 1871 at the spot where two railways were to meet.

Which singer of Hello and All Night Long found fame with the Commodores, a band formed by Alabama college freshmen?

Lionel Richie grew up on the very campus where the band met, in a family home that the school's founder had given to his grandparents.

Which future congressman, born to sharecroppers near Troy, Alabama, had his skull fractured on the 1965 Selma march?

John Lewis carried the scars on his head for the rest of his life, and went on to represent Atlanta in Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020.

Which ship, its wreck identified in Alabama in 2019, brought the last known cargo of enslaved Africans to America?

Clotilda was burned and scuttled after its 1860 voyage in an attempt to destroy the evidence. Once free, people it had carried helped found the community of Africatown.

Which Alabama ghost town, built where two rivers meet and flooded repeatedly, was the state's first permanent capital?

Cahaba kept the capital for only five years. After a major flood in 1865 it lost the county seat as well, and its people moved away and left it to ruin.

Which fruit gives its shape to the giant water tower in Clanton, Alabama, the heart of the state's main growing county?

Peaches from Chilton County make up over 80% of Alabama's crop, and immigrant growers are credited with starting the industry more than a century ago.

The Black Belt, a band of central Alabama once thick with cotton plantations, was first named for which feature?

Its dark, rich soil made the region prime cotton land, and the name later took on a second meaning from the enslaved African Americans forced to work it.

Which German-born engineer led the Huntsville, Alabama, team whose rocket launched America's first satellite in 1958?

Wernher von Braun also worked with Walt Disney on television films that sold Americans on the idea of spaceflight, years before his team joined NASA.

Which craft brought museum fame to the women of Gee's Bend, an isolated hamlet on a loop of the Alabama River?

Quilting in Gee's Bend goes back to the nineteenth century, handed down among direct descendants of the people enslaved on the plantation there.

Which Harlem Renaissance author of Their Eyes Were Watching God was born in the small town of Notasulga, Alabama?

Zora Neale Hurston was three when her family left for Eatonville, Florida, the town she went on to use as the setting for many of her stories.

Which place off Alabama's coast was first named for a massacre by a French explorer who found a pile of skeletons?

Dauphin Island's bones were really a burial mound that a hurricane had torn apart, but the grim name stuck until the island was renamed for the heir to the French throne.

Which bourbon-laced layered dessert, an official Alabama state symbol, was devised in the town of Clayton in the 1890s?

Lane cake carries the name of the Georgia native who created it, though in her own 1898 recipe book she simply called it her prize cake.

Which jazz bandleader, born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, claimed to be an alien from Saturn on a peace mission?

Sun Ra took his name from the Egyptian god of the Sun, disowned his birth name for the rest of his life, and is hailed as a pioneer of Afrofuturism.

Which saxophonist recorded the mournful piece Alabama weeks after a 1963 bomb killed four girls in a Birmingham church?

John Coltrane taped it sixty-four days after the attack, and one jazz historian says its melody follows the rhythms of a speech by Martin Luther King.

Demopolis, Alabama, was founded by exiled followers of which fallen ruler, who were told to plant grapes and olives?

Napoleon's exiled officers and their families cleared the townsite, then learned from a survey that their land grant began a short way to the east and had to start again.

Fairhope, Alabama, was founded in 1894 as a colony testing the single-tax ideas of which American economist?

Henry George's followers, a group of 28 who had organised in Des Moines, Iowa, wanted a model community free from every form of private monopoly.