A mill on the Mulberry Fork, named for early settler Gabriel Hanby, with its own post office open 1855-1866 and again 1870-1894. Named directly as a landmark in John T. Milner’s 1859 railroad survey report, on an alternate route considered for what became the South & North Alabama Railroad.
A genuinely separate operation from the Hanby mill and forge on Turkey Creek, miles away, run by John Hanby and his son David - different river, and a different fate: the Turkey Creek operation was destroyed in 1865, while this post office kept running for another three decades after. No source directly confirms a family relationship between Gabriel Hanby and John Hanby, but their birth years are suggestive: John (b. 1774) is close enough in age to Gabriel (b. 1786) to plausibly be his brother, both sons of Gabriel’s documented father, David Hanby (1745-1827) - a real inference from the ages involved, not a sourced fact.
The family relation is now confirmed, from a named source. Robin Sterling’s Tales of Old Blount County, Alabama (2013, p. 36) records that James Dalton Hanby (1808-1858) and his brother David Hanby - both sons of John Hanby and Elizabeth Tatum, and nephews of Gabriel Hanby - each built corn, flour and saw mills in the area: David’s along the Turkey Creek tributaries, James’s along the Blount and Walker county line on the Mulberry branch of the Warrior River. Sterling states that “Hanby’s Mill near Arkadelphia did a large part of the grinding for Blount and Walker County” and that it “became a community focal point and was the site of an area post office for some years” - matching this entry’s own record of the Mulberry Fork mill and its post office. The two operations were run by brothers, not by unrelated families.
What happened to it. James Dalton Hanby died 28 October 1858, and his widow Lucretia Crump Hanby operated the mill herself for several years afterwards. She then sold it to Joe Allbritton, and it was later sold to Daniel Drennen - connecting the mill to the same family as Mel Drennen of Blount Springs. Two of James and Lucretia’s sons died in Confederate service. Mary Gordon Duffee wrote about the mill in the Blount County News-Dispatch of 18 February 1892.