Hayden, AL

At the 2020 census, Hayden was a Blount County town of 1,342 people in the valley between Blount Mountain and Straight Mountain. The place was first called Rockland, probably for the rocky ground, and became Hayden when the Louisville & Nashville Railroad arrived in 1914. The name honors Major Hayden, an early settler and former Army officer whose grave sits on the hill now known as Hayden Mountain.

Hayden's early mail service ran out of Ely Merrill's house, and the town's schools grew in stages from a one-room log building to a 12-grade school in the 1920s. The town incorporated in 1949 and now sits in the southwest corner of Blount County, with Hayden Mountain rising on the northwest side. The mountain keeps the town's horizon from ever feeling flat. The ridge keeps watch. Its story is a good small-town Alabama sequence: rocky ground, a railroad name change, a family cemetery, and schools that expanded as the settlement gathered around them.