Template:Wp-Nauvoo, Alabama-History

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The town of Nauvoo was founded in 1888, during the construction of the Northern Alabama Railway, and was formerly a center of coal mining. The town grew out of isolated agricultural settlements on the Walker County-Winston County line, which had been known unofficially as Blackwell's Crossing and Ingle Mills (or Ingle's Mill) after prominent local landowners. Railroad construction drove the development of the town center on Joshua Blackwell's property, but he declined to have the new town be named officially in his honor. The local resident Tom Carroll suggested the name "Nauvoo," after Nauvoo, Illinois — a city founded by Mormon prophet Joseph Smith in 1839 and later the site of an Icarian colony settlement — reportedly "because he had admired the [Illinois] town... in his earlier travels through that state." By 1891, the town was mentioned in the Winston Herald as "Nauvoo, a flourishing town with three stores and one steam gin doing good business." Nauvoo incorporated in 1906.