Anniston, AL

Anniston developed in the 1870s around the Woodstock Iron Company in Calhoun County, Alabama. Samuel Noble and Daniel Tyler organised the company in 1872, and the settlement took the name Anniston in 1873. Planned as a private industrial community, it had a regular street grid, workers' housing, schools, churches and parks. Its early layout reflects the founders' attempt to control both industrial production and the environment in which their workforce lived.

The city also occupies an important place in the history of the American civil rights movement. On 14 May 1961, a segregationist mob attacked Freedom Riders arriving at its Greyhound bus station. The violence drew national attention to resistance against desegregation in interstate travel. The former station is now part of Freedom Riders National Monument, preserving a site where the struggle for equal rights became visible to the wider country.