Biohazard Cleanup Near North Newbern Newbern, AL

Newbern is a town in southeastern Hale County, in Alabama's Black Belt region, on State Highway 61 near the Perry County line; it is part of the Tuscaloosa metropolitan area.

The area was first settled in 1816 and was originally called Cane Brake for its dense canebrakes; its first grist mill was built in 1818 and its first store in 1829.

F. A. Borden built the first post office in 1832, and in 1834 two of his brothers arrived from North Carolina, bought much of the land in the area, and laid out a town named after New Bern, North Carolina, the former British colonial capital.

The Saline Hotel, Newbern's first lodging house, was built in the early 1850s, and the town incorporated in 1854.

Newbern was originally part of Greene County and became part of Hale County when that county was created in 1867.

A railroad running from Uniontown reached Newbern in 1859, and the 9th Alabama Infantry Regiment was organized in the town in November 1861 to fight in the Civil War.

The town's economy rested on cotton and sharecropping until the Great Depression, and catfish farming, introduced in the area in the 1960s, became an important local industry.

The 2020 census counted 133 residents in Newbern, down from 186 in 2010 and a peak of 564 in 1900.

About 64 percent of Newbern's residents identified as Black or African American in the 2020 census.

Since 1993, Newbern has been the home of Auburn University's Rural Studio, the design-build architecture program founded by Samuel Mockbee and D. K. Ruth to create well-designed housing and civic buildings for the impoverished Black Belt.