Fredonia, AL

Fredonia is a Chambers County census-designated place of 198 residents at the 2020 census, and it once served as the trade and school center for the county's northeastern corner. The community was incorporated in 1853 and had sixteen businesses in its earlier heyday, including hotels, taverns, a blacksmith shop, a tan yard, a jug factory, and the county's first Methodist church. There was even a place called the Temperance House, which tells you Fredonia had room for both sides of a nineteenth-century argument.

ATTRSaveRivers / CC BY-SA 3.0

The building that gives Fredonia its strongest present-day link to the past is the New Hope Rosenwald School. Built in 1915 for Black students, the one-teacher school operated until 1964 and is now being restored by the New Hope Foundation as a museum and community center. The school's story belongs to the wider Rosenwald effort that helped build thousands of schools across the rural South. Fredonia is small on the map, but its schoolhouse carries a big piece of Alabama's education history.