Conecuh County () is a county located in the south-central portion of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census the population was 11,597. Its county seat is Evergreen. Its name is believed to be derived from a Creek Indian term meaning "land of cane."
History
The areas along the rivers had been used by varying cultures of indigenous peoples for thousands of years. French and Spanish explorers encountered the historic Creek Indians. Later, British colonial traders developed relationships with the Creek and several married high-status Creek women. As the tribe has a matrilineal system, children are considered born into their mother's clan and take their status from her family.
During the American Revolutionary War, the Upper Creek chief Alexander McGillivray, whose father was Scottish, allied his tribe with the British, hoping they could stop colonial Americans from encroaching on Creek land. Commissioned a British colonel, McGillivray named Jean-Antoine Le Clerc, a French adventurer who lived with the Creeks for 20 years, as the war chief to lead the Creek warriors.
Conecuh County was established by Alabama on February 13, 1818. Some of its territory was taken in 1868 by the Republican state legislature during the Reconstruction era to establish Escambia County. Located in the coastal plain, 19th century Conecuh County was an area of plantations and cotton cultivation, and it is still quite rural today. Thousands of African American residents left in the 1940s, during the Second Great Migration, mostly for industrial regions in the major cities.
In September 1979, the county was declared a disaster area, due to damage caused by Hurricane Frederic.
Conecuh County was mentioned as the birthplace of Theodore Bagwell in the television series Prison Break.
Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which is land and (0.3%) is water.
Major highways
- 20px Interstate 65
- 20px U.S. Highway 31
- 20px U.S. Highway 84
- 20px State Route 41
- 20px State Route 83
Adjacent counties
- Butler County (northeast)
- Covington County (southeast)
- Escambia County (south)
- Monroe County (northwest)
Sausage
Known as "The Sausage of the South", Conecuh County is also known as the birthplace of Conecuh sausage. In the days before most had freezers, a man named Henry Sessions formulated his recipe for hickory smoked pork sausage. After returning from World War II, Sessions worked as a salesman for a meatpacking plant in Montgomery, Alabama. He started Sessions Quick Freeze in Evergreen in 1947 so that people could bring their pigs and cattle, have them slaughtered, and store them and their vegetables in his rentable meat locker. But it was Sessions' high-quality smoked pork sausage that put his company on the map. Customer demand for the sausage made the family butcher 250 hogs a week to satisfy these cravings. Today the 100-employee company makes 35,000- 40,000 pounds of sausage a week.