Before coal and iron ore transformed Jones Valley in the 19th century, the area was home to several Native American tribes. When the first Paleo-Indians came to the fertile lands in this area some 20,000 years ago, the forests and rivers gave them all of the natural resources they needed to survive. During the Mississippians’ time (AD 1050–1540) when the temperatures warmed, the people built large permanent towns and villages, planted their crops, and built many large earth mounds. When this agrarian culture was at its height, it established a major religious and commercial center at Moundville, Alabama, a short 70 miles southwest from present-day Birmingham. Other mound builders left several cone-shaped mounds along Village Creek and in the southwestern portion of the valley near Jonesboro.
Hundreds of years later, when the Europeans arrived in greater numbers in what would one day be called “Alabama,” around half of the historic Native American tribes were either Creek or from smaller groups within the Creek confederacy who occupied central and eastern Alabama, including the Birmingham area. The Chickasaws lived in the northwest, and the Choctaws occupied the southwest. The Cherokee inhabited northeastern Alabama. It is hard to imagine that just a scant 200 years ago, at the start of the 19th century, this was the scene. Paths that Native Americans had followed for centuries ran along the summit of Red Mountain and most likely along the valley floor as well. Beyond what is today’s Birmingham, trails ran from Big Spring in Huntsville to Tuscaloosa, from Talladega to the Warrior River and beyond. Native Americans created permanent towns at Old Town on the Warrior River and Mud Town along the Cahaba River. Within less than a century—from 1800 to 1898 when Birmingham was one of the world’s largest producers of pig iron—the area of Jones Valley would transform dramatically from a sylvan landscape populated by Creeks and Cherokee tribes wielding bows and arrows to a mighty powerhouse of the Industrial Age: Birmingham.