A wealthy Greene County merchant and land speculator, son of Dominique Constantine, one of Napoleon’s officers, and himself part of the earlier Olive and Vine Colony of French refugees in Marengo County. Owned property in Blount County by 1867. In 1872, while one of the first residents of the new city of Birmingham, he founded L’Orient, named for his own French birthplace, as a town adjoining the hotel and eight sulphur springs of Blount Springs. He likely drew the idea from Dr. Herdon Beverly Robinson, formerly of Greene County and Birmingham, who had opened a hospital at Blount Springs.
L’Orient barely outlasted the sale of its own town lots, though Constantine’s heirs still held land there as late as 1923.
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.