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- Town
14,063
68%
$42,200
17.4%
America/Chicago
35967 35968
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Fort Payne, AL - History
We would like to provide the residents of Fort Payne a basic history overview.
Welcome to the Fort Payne Home page. The Fort Payne Home page provides as much information as possible on Fort Payne. Knowing Fort Payne’s history is essential to guiding its future. Within Fort Payne’s Home page, you will also find Fort Payne’s Founders, Holiday, and Birthday sections.
Fort Payne has a population of 14063. 46.9% of Fort Payne’s inhabitants are Male, and 53.1 are female. 49.5% of Fort Payne is married and 67.5% own their own home. The Average Home price is $130,511, and the average rent is $592. Household median income in Fort Payne is $42,200, and the individual median income is $22,904. Fort Payne’s Ethnic is the following: White(82.6%), Hispanic(18.2%), Other(10.5%), Black(3.4%), Multiple(2.4%), Native(0.7%), Asian(0.4%).
Although European Americans had pressed for Indian removal in the Southeast because they were homesteaders and wanted to settle in the area, by the 1860s, the city of Fort Payne and the surrounding area were sparsely settled. Development of cotton plantations and larger settlements had taken place in the uplands region known as the Black Belt.
With no strategic targets nearby, during the Civil War only minor skirmishes between Union and Confederate forces took place here. About the time of the Second Battle of Chattanooga, a large Union force briefly entered the county, but it did not engage substantial Confederate forces.In 1878 the city Fort Payne was designated as the county seat, and in 1889 it was incorporated as a town.
The community of Lebanon had served as the DeKalb county seat since 1850. With the completion of rail lines between Birmingham and Chattanooga that went through Fort Payne, the city's growth was stimulated as it was connected to the new transportation route. County sentiment had supported having the seat in a community served by the railroad, seen as key to the future.In the late 1880s, Fort Payne's growth was stimulated after the discovery of coal and iron deposits, needed to support industrialization in the region.
Investors and especially workers from New England and the North flooded into the region for new jobs. This period is called the "Boom Days", or simply the "Boom". Many of the notable historic buildings in Fort Payne date from this period of economic growth and prosperity, including the state's oldest standing theater, the Fort Payne Opera House; the former factory of the Hardware Manufacturing Company (today known as the W.
B. Davis Mill Building, now the location of the Fort Payne Depot Museum, formerly the passenger station for the present-day Norfolk Southern Railway. Following the decline of passenger traffic as people took to automobiles, today the depot serves as a museum of local history.The iron and coal deposits were much smaller than expected.
Many of the promoters left the region for Birmingham, Alabama, which became the state's major industrial city. Fort Payne suffered a period of economic decline. In 1907, the W.B. Davis Hosiery Mill began operations, processing area cotton to produce socks and hosiery. Hosiery manufacture led the economy in Fort Payne.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the hosiery industry in Fort Payne employed over 7,000 people in more than 100 mills. It produced more than half of the socks made in the United States and claimed to be the "Sock Capital of the World." Beginning in the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement lowered tariffs on textile products imported into the United States, resulting in large increases in sock imports.
By the early 2000s a very large, highly-efficient centre for sock production had grown up around Datang, Zhuji in Zhejiang Province, China. Raw materials and hosiery machines were also manufactured at Datang. While in Fort Payne a company might have to wait two months for a replacement part for a hosiery machine to arrive from Italy, a manufacturer in Datang would have to wait half an hour for the part to arrive from a local company.
American multinational retail corporations began to source hosiery products from Datang. The American companies’ strict negotiating positions required the Datang producers to accept as little as 3% profit. As American retail corporations began to source their products from China, Datang became the new "Sock Capital of the World." Many businesses in Fort Payne accused foreign manufacturers, particularly those from China, of engaging in dumping of socks below cost to force American companies out of the sock business.
By 2005, hosiery mill employment in Fort Payne had declined to around 5,500, and several mills had closed. In late 2005, the federal government gained an agreement with the Chinese government to slow the schedule for the removal of tariffs, delaying their full removal until 2008. The hosiery industry continues to have a foothold in the community, diversifying from athletic socks to boutique designs such as Zkano, and other specialty and medical socks. In the 1990s, facing the international threat to their manufacturing, business and civic leaders in Fort Payne began to take steps to diversify the city's economy.
Several new commercial and industrial projects were developed. The largest was the 2006 construction of a distribution center for The Children's Place stores, a facility that employed 600 people in its first phase of operation.Other large corporations represented in Fort Payne include Heil Environmental Industries (a division of Dover Industries, manufacturing sanitation trucks); Vulcraft (a division of Nucor Corporation, manufacturing steel roofing systems); and Game Time (a division of Playcore, manufacturing commercial playground equipment).
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