Welcome to Perry County
If one word could describe PERRY COUNTY, ALABAMA, that word would be Diversity! Its people, its land, its weather and its location are all balanced by the contrasts they provide.
Located in west central Alabama, PERRY COUNTY was established in the same year Alabama became a state, and early in its development was called upon to give some of its territory to help establish surrounding counties. Eventually, PERRY COUNTY stabilized with its present 745 square miles of balanced landscape. From the northern part of the county where forests cover the trailing end of the Appalachian Mountains, the hills and valleys give way to the grass covered prairies and geometric croplands of the fabled Black Belt. The generous rains of the changing seasons feed the streams and creeks that run East to the Alabama River and West to the Tombigbee River. Coursing through the county itself is one of America's last free running wild rivers, The Cahaba, a river that boasts more species of fish than any other in the United States.
Once peopled by Native Americans who hunted and farmed its virgin landscape, PERRY COUNTY saw the influx of a cross-section of the immigrants who settled our United States. These representatives of the countries and cultures of Europe brought with them their skills, religions, and institutions. One of the institutions that came to PERRY COUNTY was that of slavery. It was by way of slavery that PERRY COUNTY gained its people who trace their ancestry to Africa. Throughout its history, the diverse people of PERRY COUNTY have taken from each other and given to each other-sometimes by conflict and sometimes by compassion, but always with a positive end result as they mirrored the melting pot nature of our nation. With mellowed emotion, Perry Countians recall participation in the historically significant Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. Today there is a harmonious blending of Caucasian and African-American cultures with a determination for a bright future.
