Flyer Distribution Anniston, AL

Anniston, located in Calhoun County of Alabama, is the county seat and an integral part of the Anniston-Oxford Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city's population was 23,106 people, as recorded by the 2010 Census. In the late 1800s, Atlanta newspaperman Henry W. Grady named the city "The Model City" due to its thoughtful planning. It is situated on the incline of Blue Mountain and has remained a renowned destination ever since.

History of Anniston, AL

The Anniston region was initially inhabited many years before the Civil War, yet the mineral sources in the area were only taken advantage of then. During Civil War times, the Confederate States of America in Anniston ran an iron furnace until it was destroyed by Union cavalry at the beginning of 1865.

In 1872, Samuel Noble and Union General Daniel Tyler created the Woodstock Iron Company. Tyler funded a large-scale reconstruction of the existing furnace and established a new community called Woodstock which was eventually renamed "Annie's Town" in honor of Tyler's daughter-in-law Annie Scott Tyler who was also married to railroad president Alfred L. The city prospered due to careful planning and convenient access to rail transportation. In 1917, when WWI began, the US Army created a training camp at Fort McClellan to prepare for the conflict.

The Anniston Army Depot was established during World War II and is a significant storage and maintenance site. Its role has been further enhanced by munition-incineration activities taking place there. Following the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure round, Fort McClellan was incorporated into Anniston in the late 1990s and closed down by the Army in 1999.

Anniston made history in 1961 when a heated moment occurred during the American Civil Rights Movement; a mob threw bombs at a bus filled with civilian Freedom Riders. Two Freedom buses left for a journey to commemorate their civil rights victory after the Supreme Court ruled on unconstitutionality in bus segregation. The Freedom Riders took an integrated bus ride to challenge the harsh Alabama segregation laws that denied African Americans their fundamental rights.

Freedom Riders National Monument

In 2017, the Freedom Riders National Monument was unveiled at the site, commemorating its essential role in history. However, on Sunday afternoon of September 15, 1963 (the same day as the tragic bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham), integration attempts were met with severe resistance. To avoid the KKK takeover of Anniston City, the HRC chairman, Rev. Phil Noble, and Miller Sproull, an elder from his church, collaborated. Rev. Noble was a white Presbyterian minister, and Sproull was a city commissioner then. Following the Birmingham church bombing, President Kennedy informed the HRC that he had dispatched more federal soldiers to Fort McClellan.

On September 16, 1963, Noble and Sproull, escorted by city police officers, took a group of black ministers to the library. This caused the bombing of the Sproull family's Anniston Hardware store in February 1964 as a form of retaliation for Commissioner Sproull's actions in support of integration. This marked the first time in the civil rights era that a white person was convicted for killing a black person in Alabama; it was a historic moment.

PCB production in Anniston began in 1929 under the Swann Chemical Company and continued until 1971. The Anniston PCB location encompasses residential, commercial, and public properties situated within and around Anniston, Alabama, during which potentially hazardous substances might be present, such as polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contaminated material. Solutia Inc.'s Anniston plant is close to downtown Anniston, Alabama, covering about 70 acres. The plant is well-known for producing Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from 1929 until 1971.