Perry County, Alabama
If one word could describe Perry County, Alabama, that word would be Diversity! Its people, its land, its weather and its location are all balanced by the contrasts they provide.

Located in West Central Alabama, Perry County was established in the same year Alabama became a state, and early in its development was called upon to give some of its territory to help establish surrounding counties. Eventually, Perry county stabilized with its present 745 square miles of balanced landscape. From the northern part of the county where forests cover the trailing end of the Appalachian Mountains, the hills and valleys give way to the grass-covered prairies aand geometric croplands of the fabled Black Belt. The generous rains of the changing seasons feed the streams and creeks that run east to the Alabama River and west to othe Tombigbee River. Coursing through the county itself is one of America's last free-running wild rivers, the Cahaba, a river that boasts more species of fish than any other in the United States. While contributing to the county's economy, the geography also tells its ancient history. The vast outcrops of brilliant chalk in the southern part tell of the countless aquatic fish and animals that inhabited the ocean that once covered the area. Its location and highways put it within a half-day's travel of the sugar-white beaches of the Gulf Coast and every major city in the Southeast. Its location also reduces hurricanes to rain showers and stiff breezes, makes tornadoes a rarity, floods tiny and localized, and earthquakes unrecorded in its history.

The economy of Perry County has been historically agricultural. Sharecropper cabins and plantation mansions still dot the landscape. Although those methods of farming have longe-since passed, agriculutre is still vital and significant, while manufacturing and retail commerce now figure prominently in the county's economy. Family farms that began with forty acres and a mule over a hundred years ago, produce agriculture products in close proximity to international industries with origins in Europe and the Pacific Rim.

Education in Perry County provides choices that include kindergartens and colleges, state-funded schools to private institutions. Physical facilities range from new to antebellum, and the educational level ranges from illiterate to intelligencia. Choices are limited only by one's desire to learn and ability to finance.

Once peopled by Native Americans who hunted and farmed its virgin landscape, Perry County saw the influx of a cross-section of the imigrants who settled our United States. These representatives of the countries and cultures of Europe brought with them their skills, religions, and institutions. One of the institutions that came to Perry County was that of slavery. It weas by way of slavery that Perry County gained its people who trace their ancestry to Africa. Throughout its history, the diverse people of Perry County have taken from each other and given to each other - sometimes by conflict and sometimes by compassion, but always with a positive end result as they mirrored the melting pot nature of our nation. At present in the county, a blending of Caucasion and African-American cultures and ideologies have meshed with Japanese, who have implemented high-tech industry. Though with lingering memory, but mellowed emotion, Perry Countians recall particaipation in the historically significant Civil Rights Movement of the Sixtires, a determination for aa harmonious future exists today.