Local city information for Magnolia Springs, AL

Magnolia Springs, Alabama is a town in south Baldwin County, in the Daphne–Fairhope–Foley Micropolitan Statistical Area. The town voted to incorporate in 2006.

Magnolia Springs is located at the headwaters of the Magnolia River, which was originally called River de Lin, or River del Salto by local residents. Various boats and steamships brought travelers into the area.

The largest enterprise in the area was turpentine distillation. These stills were burned by their owners in 1865 to prevent them from being captured when Union soldiers began amassing in the area.

The area has historically had a large Creole population, sometimes called Cajun by the majority white residents.

Horace Mann Bond, a Fisk University sociologist, in 1931 studied Magnolia Springs and reported on it as a place where people self-identified in race. He called it an example of a "racial island." In doing so, he described the area based on his journey taken to reach the town.

One leaves "the Old Spanish Trail at the eastern head of the Cochrane Bridge, and drives south through Fairhope along Mobile Bay. Ten or fifteen miles beyond is the pleasant little village of Magnolia Springs, and one is in the sandy Gulf Coast soil where these people have their farms and community life. They call themselves 'Creoles', and their white neighbors qualify the term by calling them 'deleted Creoles.' The question of Negro blood has long been a sensitive spot with the Creole population of Louisiana and other southern states, but in Baldwin County it means only one thing to the dominant white class: some degree of Negro extraction."


"A stop at a little crossroads store where the young Creole clerk volunteered more information led us still farther into the intricacies of life among the Magnolia Springs Creoles. The clerk was a small man whose complexion had a hint of reddish brown, and he was one of the few men in the community who bore a French family name. He claimed to be the great-grandson of an officer in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. He had come to the Baldwin County community from across the bay. He gave as his reason the decay of the Creole community in Mobile County, and stated that this disintegration was almost complete."

Several structures in the town are on the National Register of Historic Places, including Moore's Grocery and St. Paul's Episcopal Church.

In May 2006 residents voted 224-96 to approve incorporation. The election results were certified by Baldwin County Probate Judge Adrian Johns June 29, 2006. Magnolia Springs recognizes this date as the town's anniversary.

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