24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Cordova, AL

Cordova is a city in central Walker County in north-central Alabama, standing on the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River about 10 miles southeast of Jasper.

The settlement was originally called Dent, or Dent's Place, after an early local family, before Captain Benjamin M. Long renamed it Cordova in 1859 for the city in Mexico where he had been stationed during the Mexican-American War.

Coal was dug around Cordova from the river and creek bottoms beginning in the early 1840s, and coal mining remained a foundation of the local economy for nearly a century.

Two railroads, the Georgia Pacific and the Kansas City, Memphis and Birmingham, laid tracks into Cordova in 1886, and its first post office had opened in 1884.

Cordova was incorporated in 1897, shortly after the Indian Head Mills textile plant opened; the mill's builder, the Nashua Manufacturing Company of New Hampshire, also built more than 100 mill houses, many of which are still standing and occupied.

Thanks to the mill and the mines, Cordova's population tripled in a single decade, from 567 in 1900 to more than 1,700 in 1910.

Indian Head Mills was one of the most highly decorated textile mills of World War II, praised by the War Department for products that exceeded government standards; local residents nicknamed it the Cordova Spinners.

Most of Cordova's coal mines had been mined out and closed by 1929, and the textile mill shut down around the middle of the twentieth century.

The 2020 census counted 1,728 residents in Cordova.

The Gilchrist House, southwest of the city, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.