Alabama’s Oldest City is One of the Gulf Coast’s First Settlements
Jennifer Lindahl, Montgomery Advertiser
Blue RAM Media/Gulf Coast News
October 22, 2025
MOBILE, Ala.
With centuries of change, conflict, and culture, Alabama’s history runs deep. The land that we now call the Yellowhammer State was originally home to Native tribes.
Alabama has shifted hands between Spain, France, Britain, and America.
Alabama became the 22nd state on December 14, 1819, and the years that followed were shaped by agriculture, conflict over race and economics, and a central role in the Civil War.
There’s one city that saw it all, founded 117 years before Alabama became a state, and it’s the oldest city in Alabama.
What was the first city in Alabama?
Founded in 1702 by a French colonist, Mobile is Alabama’s oldest city and one of the Gulf Coast’s earliest settlements. The original town was built on low ground just downstream from Fort Louis de la Louisiane.
Brothers Pierre Le Moyne D’lberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, both French Canadians, established the site to secure France’s claim over the vast Louisiana territory.
After disease and flooding hit the first location hard, Bienville ordered the town moved downriver in 1711, where Mobile still stands today.
Mobile is a city that knows how to celebrate, and it’s been doing it longer than just about anywhere else in the U.S.
Best known for hosting the country’s oldest Mardi Gras, the city’s parades and parties pack the streets with beads, music, and a whole lot of Southern flair every year. But Mobile isn’t just a party town. Its historic neighborhoods showcase homes that tell stories of the city’s rich, multicultural past.
Today, Mobile is a thriving Gulf Coast port city with a buzzing art scene, festivals like BayFest, and plenty of fresh seafood on the table. From the USS Alabama battleship museum to galleries and theaters downtown, there’s a mix of history and modern culture that keeps Mobile both rooted and vibrant.
Long thought to be Mobile, Childersburg, Ala., makes a bold claim that it’s actually the oldest continuously occupied settlement in the state, possibly in the entire U.S.
According to the City of Childersburg website, a U.S. congressional report from 1939 traces Childersburg’s roots to 1540, when Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto encountered the Native village of Coca Coosa, part of the powerful Coosa Indian Nation.
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