9 Alabama Small Towns That Outshine Every Big-City Attraction Nearby

On November 30, 1954, a rock from outer space crashed through a roof in Sylacauga, Alabama, and hit a napping woman named Ann Hodges.

It’s the only documented case in recorded history of a meteorite striking a person.

Birmingham, an hour up the road, has never had a story like it.

These are the small Alabama towns whose claim to fame beats whatever the nearest big city has to offer.

Scottsboro

Scottsboro holds the only store in the country built entirely from unclaimed airline luggage.

Unclaimed Baggage opened in 1970 after a local salesman borrowed a pickup truck and a $300 loan to buy his first batch of lost suitcases.

Huntsville sits 41 miles away, home to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and NASA’s own rocket history.

Scottsboro’s own store still pulls in more than a million visitors a year from every state and over 40 countries.

Shoppers dig through racks of strangers’ unworn coats, unclaimed cameras, and diamond rings nobody ever came back for.

Wetumpka

Wetumpka sits on the rim of a crater punched into the earth by an asteroid.

The strike happened about 83 million years ago, back when the spot sat under 100 feet of shallow sea.

That crater still measures 4.7 miles across.

Its crescent ridge of hills rings the edge of downtown.

The Wetumpka Impact Crater Discovery & Visitors Center maps the whole scar.

A self-guided driving tour heads from there up to the Bald Knob Mountain overlook, with a view straight down into the crater floor.

Worth the drive up.

The Montgomery Zoo sits 18 miles south.

None of its exhibits were carved by a rock from space.

Sylacauga

Sylacauga is where that meteorite crashed through a roof, bounced off a radio, and bruised Ann Hodges’ hip as she napped on her living room couch.

Doctors and scientists still call it the first documented case of a meteorite hitting a person.

Sylacauga has a second claim, too.

Its quarries produced the marble used in the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Supreme Court building.

Only the meteorite fell from space.

The marble didn’t.

Forty-seven miles up the road, Birmingham has Vulcan, the largest iron statue ever cast.

That statue is famous for being big, not for falling out of the sky.

Enterprise

Enterprise is the only city in the world with a monument built to honor a pest.

Local businessman Bon Fleming raised the money for it after the boll weevil chewed through the county’s cotton in 1915.

The town unveiled the monument on December 11, 1919.

About 5,000 people showed up.

Losing the crop pushed farmers into peanuts.

Within two years, Coffee County led the entire country in peanut production.

Dothan sits 30 miles away, home to the Wiregrass Museum of Art.

That museum doesn’t have a statue thanking an insect for saving its economy.

A bug did that.

Magnolia Springs

Magnolia Springs runs the only water mail route in the country that operates every day of the year.

It started in 1915, back when the clay road into town turned to mud.

Residents couldn’t reliably reach the post office.

So the mail started coming by boat instead.

It still does.

The USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park sits 35 miles northwest in Mobile.

None of its exhibits float up to a mailbox to make a delivery.

More than a century later, a carrier still motors down the Fish River each morning, dropping letters into roughly 200 mailboxes hung out over the water on private docks.

Fort Payne

Fort Payne became known for socks, but Little River Canyon is what draws people off the interstate.

The National Park Service calls it one of the deepest canyon systems east of the Mississippi River, and the deepest in Alabama.

Some stretches drop more than 600 feet from rim to river.

That’s a long way down.

Gadsden sits 38 miles away, home to Noccalula Falls Park and its 90-foot waterfall.

Huntsville sits closer to 70.

Neither city has a canyon rim to walk along after dinner.

Tuskegee

Tuskegee packs two separate National Park Service sites into a town of about 9,000 people.

The Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site preserves Booker T. Washington’s home and the lab where George Washington Carver worked out his peanut and sweet potato experiments.

Not far away at Moton Field, the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site marks the airstrip where the nation’s first Black military pilots learned to fly.

Two landmarks, one town.

The Alabama State Capitol stands 40 miles west in Montgomery, the state capital.

That building doesn’t pack two national landmarks within city limits.

Eufaula

Eufaula holds the second-largest historic district in Alabama, with more than 700 preserved nineteenth-century buildings still standing.

Only one district in the state ranks bigger.

A whole downtown, preserved.

Every April, homeowners open their doors for a pilgrimage tour.

Porches that never see a stranger fill up with visitors for a weekend.

Columbus, Georgia, sits 48 miles east across the Chattahoochee River, home to the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center.

That museum doesn’t have a wraparound porch to its name.

Demopolis

Demopolis holds Gaineswood, a mansion so architecturally rare it earned a spot as a National Historic Landmark.

Planter Nathan Bryan Whitfield spent 18 years building it, from 1843 to 1861, and designed domed ceilings and skylit rooms himself.

He worked all three classical Greek architectural orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, into one house.

Few American homes attempt that.

Tuscaloosa sits about 60 miles north, and many visitors go there for Bryant-Denny Stadium on a Saturday, not for a domed antebellum library with a skylight.

Demopolis also keeps Bluff Hall, an 1832 home built for a planter’s daughter that later picked up its own set of Greek Revival columns.