Founded around 1872 by Dr. Francis Louis Constantine, a French-immigrant land speculator, as a town adjoining the hotel and eight sulphur springs of Blount Springs, named for his own birthplace in France. L’Orient barely outlasted the sale of its own town lots, though Constantine’s heirs still held land there as late as 1923. An alternate name the Blount Springs post office also went by for a stretch in the 1870s, per an 1874 newspaper notice.
Appears in: Blount Springs.
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.