Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Loachapoka, AL

Loachapoka is a small town in western Lee County, Alabama, less than a mile west of Auburn and part of the Auburn metropolitan area.

Its name comes from the Muskogee words locha, meaning "turtle," and poga, meaning "killing place," so Loachapoka means "turtle-killing place."

A Creek village stood on the site as early as 1796, and the first white settler, Square Talley, arrived in 1836; the settlement, first called Ball's Fork, sat on a stagecoach route from Montgomery.

Loachapoka became a regional trade center in the 1840s when it was the easternmost point on the railroad from Montgomery, but its fortunes faded after the Civil War and its population had fallen to 136 by 1896.

The town has been incorporated three separate times — first in 1910, again in 1926, and still again in 1974.

The 2020 census counted just 160 residents in Loachapoka, a fraction of its nineteenth-century size.

Loachapoka is the location of the first Rosenwald School, part of the famous program that built schools for Black children across the rural South.

The Loachapoka Historic District, with its antebellum homes and churches dating to the 1840s, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 11, 1973.

Every October the town hosts Syrup Sopping Day at Pioneer Park, where sugar cane is ground by mule power and cooked into syrup the old-fashioned way; the festival, combined with the Lee County Historical Fair as Pioneer Day, draws many thousands of visitors to a town of 160.

The Lee County Historical Society Museum at Pioneer Park occupies an 1845 general store and anchors a six-and-a-half-acre park of nine historic buildings and five gardens evoking the 1850s.