Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near West Elberta Elberta, AL

Elberta is a town in southern Baldwin County, Alabama, and part of the Daphne-Fairhope-Foley metropolitan area near the Gulf Coast.

Elberta was founded by the Baldwin County Colonization Company, a Chicago-based land company organized in 1903 by three German businessmen to create a German farming settlement near Perdido Bay.

The first settler families arrived in January 1904, many of them German immigrants who had come to America by way of the Midwest, and the land was divided into 20- and 40-acre farm tracts.

The company laid out roads on Midwestern-style section lines running due north and south and east and west, giving the farming community a grid pattern unusual for the Deep South.

The community's first organized churches were Catholic in 1905 and Lutheran in 1908, and many residents spoke German; St. Mark's Lutheran Church offered German-language services until 1976.

The town was incorporated by a vote of residents on December 9, 1952.

The 2020 census counted 1,974 people in 860 households in Elberta, up sharply from 1,498 in 2010 and just 552 in 2000 as the Gulf Coast area has grown.

Elberta's best-known tradition is the Elberta German Sausage Festival, started in the 1970s to support the volunteer fire department and now held on the last weekends of March and October, featuring polka music, German sausage, and some 250 arts and crafts vendors.

The October 2014 edition of the sausage festival drew an estimated 40,000 visitors to the small town.

Elberta is home to the Baldwin County Heritage Museum on U.S. Highway 98, which displays farm equipment and historic buildings, including the old St. Mark's Lutheran Church building that was moved to the grounds and restored.