Alabama does not mean Here We Rest, and its capital moved five times
A popular story says Alabama means Here We Rest, a translation first floated in an 1842 newspaper article. Specialists in Muskogean languages have found no support for it. The name really comes from the Alabama people, and its meaning is still argued over, possibly herb gatherers or clearers of the thicket.
Alabama sits in the Deep South between Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi. It ranks 30th among states by area and 24th by population. Nicknamed the Yellowhammer State after its state bird, it takes that name from a Confederate cavalry company from Huntsville whose uniforms had yellow trim. The Alabama people lived just below where the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers meet, and French maps by 1702 labelled the river after them. Some scholars link the word to the Choctaw alba, plants, and amo, to cut or gather.
People lived here for thousands of years before Europeans. Between 1000 and 1600 AD the farming Mississippian culture spread across most of what is now Alabama, and Moundville was its second-largest classic centre after Cahokia in Illinois. Hernando de Soto's Spanish expedition passed through in 1540, the French founded Old Mobile in 1702 and moved it to today's site in 1711, and the British held the area from 1763 until losing the Revolutionary War. Spain kept Mobile until its garrison surrendered to US forces on April 13, 1813.
Congress created the Alabama Territory on March 3, 1817, and admitted it as the 22nd state on December 14, 1819. The seat of government then kept moving: Huntsville served temporarily, Cahaba was the first permanent capital from 1820 to 1825 and is now a ghost town, Tuscaloosa followed from 1826 to 1846, and Montgomery hosted its first legislative session in December 1847. The Alabama Fever land rush drew settlers to cotton land, and the Black Belt, named for its dark soil, was built on plantations worked by enslaved people. By 1860, 435,080 of the state's 964,201 residents were enslaved.
The economy broadened after World War II. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center opened in Huntsville in 1960, seeding an aerospace industry, and Huntsville is now the largest city by population and area.
Source: Alabama
