The Home of Leaders and Martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement The capital of Alabama represents an important place in the fight for voting rights, with the Alabama State Capitol Building having served as the end point of the third march for voting rights from Selma. Risking It All and Riding for Freedom. Riding for Freedom Learn More. Marching for the Vote. Learn More. Celebrate the Life and Message of Young Dr. King Learn More. In Memoriam: Rep.
Later, the Lightning Route electric trolley system and in the Wright Brothers' civilian flying school brought it recognition as a center of technology. During the turbulent civil rights era , Montgomery citizens played a central role in some of its most important events, including the bus boycott and the Selma to Montgomery March.
In , the city elected its first African American mayor, Steven L. Reed, who also was the first black probate judge in Montgomery County. He is the son of the former longtime Alabama Education Association associate executive secretary and state Democratic Party official Joe L.
Today, the city is the center of policy and economic development leading the state's rise as a manufacturing and technology center. Before the state of Alabama was even established, the site of present-day Montgomery was an important crossroads that straddled major Native American trade routes, with paths, streams, and the Alabama River connecting the Creek Indians to a wider world. Beginning in the sixteenth century, European intrusions began changing the destiny of the original inhabitants.
By , with the signing of the Treaty of Fort Jackson , the Creeks had ceded millions of acres, including what is now Montgomery County, to the United States. Richard Montgomery Settlers flooded the area, establishing numerous cotton plantations. With mechanization of textile production, the demand for cotton increased rapidly. The site again served as a crossroads for this emerging industry. In and , three small settlements sprang up on the banks of the Alabama River, with two of these communities merging in to form the town of Montgomery, named for Gen.
Richard Montgomery, a hero of the Revolutionary War. In , the town became the seat of Montgomery County, itself named in for Maj. Lemeul Montgomery, an officer killed in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. As Alabama settlement expanded, the state legislature looked to relocate the capital from Tuscaloosa , in the west-central part of the state. Montgomery entrepreneur Andrew Dexter, for whom the city's famed Dexter Avenue is named, was among its earliest promoters as the site of the new state capital.
He had even reserved a portion of his property, known as "Goat Hill," at the eastern end of Market Street for the location of the state house.
In , Montgomery won the long-sought prize when the legislature chose it as the capital city. One of the major points in the town's favor was the Creek land cession that pushed the boundary of Alabama eastward to the Chattahoochee River, thus placing Montgomery quite close to the state's geographic center.
Other significant factors included the developing railroads , the free land Goat Hill , and the funds that the city would raise through a bond issue to finance the construction of the state house. Completed in , the Greek Revival edifice burned to the ground in December Wallace, then known for his "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!
The trail incorporates U. Highway 80 from Selma to Montgomery and introduces visitors to the significance of the march and its impact on American culture. While they represent the major phases of its history, there is much more to Montgomery besides Civil War and Civil Rights.
At Old Alabama Town, for example, visitors can explore a variety of historic structures dating from the earliest days of the state. Among them are churches, shops and even a tavern that was in use before Montgomery was founded. Prior to , the present site of the city was in the center of the Creek Nation. A large Indian mound and other traces of an important prehistoric center can still be seen today at Fort Toulouse - Fort Jackson park north of town.
Most scholars agree that Hernando de Soto passed through the area in , encountering the ancestors of the Creeks. John Scott, who with several other migrants from Georgia founded the town on the bluff of the Alabama River. The men abandoned it when a group from New England, led by Andrew Dexter, founded a nearby town in what is now the downtown area of Montgomery and named it New Philadelphia.
Scott and his companions then built a new town they called East Alabama. The bitter rivalry ended, however, when the towns merged on December 3, , and incorporated as the city of Montgomery, just prior to Alabama being admitted as a state.
Montgomery County Courthouse The city of Montgomery prospered and became the county seat in and Alabama's permanent capital in Although it bears the same name as the county, the city was named in honor of a different person, Maj. Richard Montgomery, who lost his life in the Revolutionary War in the assault against Quebec. The city and the county of Montgomery have been the site of many firsts, with the distinction of being known as the birthplace of the both the Civil War and the civil-rights movement.
On February 18, , Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the president of the Confederate States of America in its initial capital of Montgomery. It was from Montgomery that a telegram was sent to authorize the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, thus commencing the Civil War. Ninety-four years later, on December 1, , Montgomery played host to a defining event in the birth of the civil-rights movement when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus.
Ten years later Martin Luther King Jr. The Civil Rights Memorial and Memorial Center , located across Washington Avenue from the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center , commemorates people who lost their lives during the civil rights movement.
Wright's Field Technological firsts were also achieved in Montgomery County. In , the nation's first electric streetcar system was put into operation in Montgomery, and in the Wright Brothers founded the first flight school for aviators at a site near the Alabama River that would later become Maxwell Air Force Base.
Orville Wright recorded the first powered flight in Alabama's history, the local press reporting that "a strange new bird soared over the cotton fields to the west of Montgomery, on March 26,
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