'Dead Towns of Alabama' describes Hamden Ridge, Sparta and other 'ghost towns'

I finished reading a really cool book on Sunday called “Dead Towns of Alabama” by W. Stuart Harris. This 155-page book originally came out in 1977 and contains a wealth of information about “ghost towns” from around Alabama, including 83 old Indian settlements, 77 fort sites and 112 colonial, territorial and state towns.

Locations in Conecuh County described in the book include Hamden Ridge and Sparta. Before the establishment of Evergreen, Hamden Ridge was one of Conecuh County’s early county seats. Located on a hill west of Murder Creek, about 10 miles south of Belleville, Hamden Ridge (sometimes spelled “Hampden” or “Hampton”) was named by early settler Alexander Autrey, who first settled in the area in 1816.

A few months after the arrival of Autrey, a number of other families arrived in the area and the area began to grow rapidly. According to “Dead Towns of Alabama,” Hamden Ridge was named the county seat in 1818, and the first courthouse at Hamden Ridge was a “crude, one-room, chestnut-log structure, in which a rough table stood on a floor of packed dirt.”

In the early 1800s, an Indian village was located across the creek from Hamden Ridge and the settlers and Indians got along with each other until Indians from another village began stealing cattle in the vicinity. The settlers at Hamden Ridge blamed the Indians across the creek and destroyed their village. The Indians retreated from the armed assault and never returned to their village.

Now that the Indians were gone, many of the Hamden Ridge settlers moved across the creek, where they started a town that eventually became Sparta. Sparta eventually outgrew Hamden Ridge and became the county seat in 1820. Hamden Ridge eventually disappeared and it “never appeared on the state maps, dying in the early days of the state’s history,” Harris wrote.

It’s said that Malachi Warren built the first cabin on what would later become the town of Sparta, and he also established a small grocery store there. His store drew a number of families to the vicinity, and in 1819 an inn called the Gauf House was built at Sparta. Dr. Jonathan Shaw eventually moved into the inn and began practicing medicine at Sparta.

Sparta got its name from Thomas Watts, who’d been living there for about a year, who suggested that they name the town after his hometown, Sparta, Ga. The courthouse there was an improvement over the one at Hamden Ridge, measuring 20x30 feet and built of pine logs.

The county’s first newspaper was established in Sparta in 1856 and it was also around this time that developers began making the big push to construct a railroad between Montgomery and Pensacola. In 1858, a telegraph line was completed between Sparta and Mobile, and the railroad was finished in 1861, just in time for the Civil War.

Four years later, in March 1865, Union troops from Milton, Fla. raided Sparta and burned the train depot and the county jail. The courthouse also burned, and this signaled the beginning of the end for Sparta. The county seat moved to Evergreen in 1866, and Sparta continued to decline to the point to where mapmakers stopped placing it on state maps.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, then I highly recommend that you check out this book for yourself. The few paragraphs above are just the tip of the iceberg as the book also contains information about Fort Bibb, Fort Dale and Middleton, all in Butler County; Montezuma in Covington County; Fillmore and Fort Crawford, both in Escambia County; and Claiborne, Fort Claiborne and Piachi, all in Monroe County.