HISTORY:

The earliest settlers in the area now known as "The Shoals" were the Cherokee, Chickasaws and Shawnees, who found plentiful food and game in this area along the Tennessee River.  The Indian Mound and Museum in Florence preserves and interprets the heritage of the area's earliest inhabitants.

General Andrew Jackson, who visited in the early 1800's, is thought to be one of the first white men to visualize the potential of northwest Alabama.  Both Jackson and another president, James Madison, bought lots in Lauderdale County's first real estate boom as well as stock in the company that started it.  The County of Lauderdale was created on February 6, 1818, on land ceded from the Indian tribes.  It was named in honor of Colonel James Lauderdale, a "gallant Tennessean" killed in 1814 in a night attack upon the British below New Orleans.

Five weeks after the creation of the county, a group from Huntsville organized The Cypress Land Company and purchased 5,515 acres on the Tennessee River at Lauderdale's southern boundary.  A young Italian engineer, Ferdinand Sannoner, was selected to survey the purchased area and lay out a city.  He chose the name Florence, after his favorite city back home, Florence, Italy.

South of the river, in what is now Colbert County (founded in 1867), agriculture had brought prominence to a booming town known as Tuscumbia, named for Chief Tashka Ambia.  As cotton grew in importance as a cash crop, huge warehouses were filled with the crop and the first railroad west of the Alleghenies was built in 1831 to move cotton from town to the river.  The Civil War destroyed the area's plantation economy and most of its plantation homes.

An adjacent community, Sheffield, turned to industry, specifically iron like England's iron-producing center of the same name.  By the end of 1888, five huge iron-making furnaces were up and housing construction flourished as more people moved to the area.

World War I brought a new boom to the Shoals area.  In 1916, Congress passed the National Defense Act, which resulted in the construction of what was then the world's largest munitions plant and Wilson Dam.  In the 1930's, the munitions plant and Wilson Dam became the initial facilities for development of an internationally known government agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority, marking the beginning of a new era of growth for the Shoals.