The Civil War largely bypassed this part of Blount County - the closest action was a Union cavalry raid that passed near Kimberly - but the years just after it kicked off the area’s first economic boom, as railroads that had profited from wartime traffic began reinvesting in expansion.
In 1867, shortly after Alabama’s readmission to the Union, the Alabama Central Railroad proposed a line from Decatur to Elyton (Birmingham did not yet exist). By 1870, survey maps show the line’s distinctive curve through the gap where Smoke Rise now sits. The South & North Alabama Railroad completed the line in September 1872, and it saw heavy traffic almost immediately.
Upstream on Turkey Creek, John Hanby and his son David had run a forge and mills supplying the Confederacy; David was killed and the operation burned by Union soldiers on April 19, 1865, in the same sweep that destroyed Bethel Church and the University of Alabama. Their site predates the railroad but marks the same stretch of country the new line would soon open up.