Vernon, AL

Vernon is Lamar County's courthouse town, and the county's name changes are tangled up with the town's own. The site first carried the name Swayne Courthouse; after Jones County was re-established as Sanford County in 1868, the town became Vernon, named at the request of local resident Edmond Vernon for his English hometown. The county's first permanent courthouse and jail went up on Vernon's public square by 1870. A later 1909 courthouse still serves the county, though its dome and columns disappeared in a 1948 modernization. That gives Vernon a very specific civic center: the courthouse is not just a building, it is the reason the town held its place.

ATTRE. W. Russell, Photographer / Public domain

Vernon has had to defend that role. Sulligent and Millport challenged the courthouse location in the early 1900s, but the county seat stayed in Vernon. Today the courthouse, judicial center, and Lamar County offices organize a town whose daily importance comes from county business rather than metro scale. The local story is Reconstruction-era Alabama in miniature—new counties, renamed governments, a courthouse built in town, and a civic center that survived the arguments over where the county should be run.