Location
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| Image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisco_City,_Alabama |
Frisco City is in Monroe County, Alabama, and is represented by the red square on the county map. It is located on Alabama State Highway 21 and is less than 10 miles south of Monroeville, the county seat.
History
The communities of Lufkin and Snider had existed in the area since the 1850s and were combined and officially incorporated as Jones Mill, Alabama, in 1909. The new town was named for the gristmill owned by a founding resident, Rev. James W. Jones, a preacher who built a large house in town in 1888.
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The town continued as Jones Mill until 1913, when it was renamed Roy, Alabama, after Roy Megargel, president of the Gulf, Florida & Alabama (GF&A) Railroad who promised to bring a branch of his railroad through the town. On November 4, 1913, the town celebrated the official opening of Roy with the sale of town lots, foot races, a baby beauty contest, and a public wedding.
Businesses such as dentist's and doctor's offices, mercantile/dry goods stores, grocery stores, even several soft drink bottling companies, made their way to the downtown area in the 1910s and 1920s.
The promised railroad never materialized, however, and the GF&A company switched owners in 1919, so Roy reverted to a pluralized form of its old name, "Jones Mills," that year.
In 1925, the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad bought the Gulf, Florida, & Alabama line, and its operators promised a freight yard would be located in Jones Mills if the town would name itself after the new railroad. Though the rail company could not get enough land to build its freight yard, it laid tracks through Jones Mills, and the town took the railroad's nickname, "Frisco" and became Frisco City in 1928.
The town still keeps a caboose from the "Frisco" line in its "Jones Park," along with the decaying James W. Jones house, the Jones Mill Jail building, and the Jones Mills Post Office.
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The town experienced rapid growth in the 1920s and 1930s. Along with churches and the growing Frisco City School (once Jones Mill Academy), businesses and buildings continued to grow in the downtown area, and the railroad added passenger cars to its freight and mail lines. The road through the two busiest miles of Frisco City, the downtown business area, was paved in 1937. Frisco City's "boom" seems to have been in the 1950s and 1960s, when businesses were packed in the downtown buildings. A business list from a Frisco City High School student's (Joyce Wiggins) 1950 paper lists at least 52 businesses operating in the downtown area, not including the public buildings like the city hall, fire station, jail, and post office. However, town's population would not reach its peak until 1990.
Through the late 1980s-2000, many of the town's downtown businesses became vacant, and the town experienced a steady population decline--from 1,581 in 1990 to an estimated 1,331 in 2009.
On November 14, 2001, the closing drug store, two vacant buildings, and a closing jewelry store were destroyed by fire, an event which changed the physical landscape of the downtown area considerably. In 2009, Frisco City's school closed, dealing yet another blow to the community.
As of November 2010, there are 14 functioning businesses in Frisco City's downtown area.
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See below for a chart containing census data on Frisco City since 1910.
