A short-lived river town on the Mulberry Fork, founded in 1820 by three proprietors, William Dunn (a Blount County judge of the county court), John Fowler, and Jonas Lyles, as a timber, cotton, coal, and keelboat-building venture. At its peak the town reportedly had churches, stores, a defensive stockade, and as many as 400 people, positioned as the highest point of navigation on Alabama’s central river system with water transport onward to Mobile.
Confirmed directly on the period USGS topo quad at approximately 33.9176, -86.8869, about six miles west of Blount Springs and a short distance upstream from Hanby Mill.
Two yellow fever epidemics and unreliable seasonal river levels ended the town within a few years, leaving little more than a cemetery. A local legend claims the settlers later moved to Elyton and helped found Birmingham; the source examined this directly and found no evidence for it beyond the shared name, tracing the proprietors’ own federal land filings to Blount and Jefferson counties instead. Decades later the same area saw a real second life as a coal-mining district from 1903 to the 1920s, when the Stouts Mountain Coal & Coke Company opened mines there, creating jobs for both the nearby African-American town of The Colony and white mining families recruited from Pennsylvania. The source names the Drennen family, a well-documented Blount and Walker County family (see Walter Melville “Mel” Drennen), as later developers of this mining, though it does not name which family member specifically. John Fowler, one of the original proprietors, also made apples a commercial success in the area starting around 1820, decades before Mont Eyrie Orchards.
LIDAR imagery over the site today shows real, faint traces of the old settlement, what look like roads and building footprints, plus some terracing, though the property itself is now totally undeveloped woods. The name survives on modern maps too: Baltimore Road leads into the area from the south. County tax records show no structures currently stand on the roughly 459-acre tract, which has been held in a family trust since at least 1985.
This is very likely the same landing described in Baltimore Ford, sourced to the same period account.
Sources: Robert S. Davis, “The Old World in the New South: Entrepreneurial Ventures in the Agricultural History of Cullman, Alabama”, Agricultural History 79 (Fall 2005): 439-61; George Powell‘s 1855 “History of Blount County.”