Many of Alabama's best-known ghost towns are river towns of the 1810s to 1830s. They grew on bluffs above the Alabama, Tombigbee and Black Warrior rivers, shipped cotton down to Mobile, served as capitals and county seats, and then lost out to a new county seat, a railroad that went elsewhere, or floods and yellow fever. Both early capitals are among them: St. Stephens was the capital of the Alabama Territory from 1817 to 1819, and Cahaba the first permanent state capital from 1820 until the legislature moved it to Tuscaloosa in 1826. Blakeley, Claiborne, Erie, Bellefonte and Pikeville were county seats.
A second group grew up around a resource. Gold camps like Arbacoochee and Chulafinnee in Cleburne County boomed in a rush whose height ran from 1836 until miners left for California in 1849. Battelle was an iron furnace town at the foot of Lookout Mountain, Mountain Mills a cotton mill village in Colbert County, and Gantts Quarry a marble town near Sylacauga. Dams drowned others: Bainbridge lies under Wilson Lake on the Tennessee River, and part of Kowaliga under Lake Martin.
Little stands at most sites. The best to visit are Old Cahawba, Historic Blakeley State Park and St. Stephens Historical Park, where street plans, cemeteries and a few ruins survive inside parks. Elsewhere expect a cemetery, a chimney or some scattered brick, often on private land.
Abandoned 
