Grant, AL

At the 2020 census, Grant was a Marshall County town of 1,039 people on the plateau of Gunters Mountain, in the Huntsville-Decatur orbit. The town sits high above the Tennessee River country, with County Road 5 running through the center and roads reaching south toward Guntersville Lake. Grant began as a late-1830s settlement, but its civic name arrived with the post office: established in 1887, it was named for Ulysses S. Grant. The town incorporated in 1945, long after the mountain had already set the shape of the community.

ATTRBrian Stansberry / CC BY 4.0

Grant's map is bigger than the crossroads suggests. The town stretches across Gunters Mountain and down toward the lake, so a short drive can shift from high plateau roads to coves and shoreline. Marshall County's older history is Cherokee and river history, with Gunter's Village and the Tennessee River shaping the region before the modern town. Grant is part of the Huntsville-Decatur Combined Statistical Area, but locally it feels like a mountain settlement with one foot in the lake country: the post office name, the high elevation, and the long roads across Gunters Mountain all still matter.