The Modern Era: Andalusia from the 20th Century to Today

The story of modern Andalusia is one of reinvention. From the textile mills that powered the economy for seven decades to the empty factories that still mark the landscape, from segregation and civil rights struggle to contemporary diversity, from isolation to connection — the city has faced the same brutal economic and social transitions that reshaped the entire rural South. What makes Andalusia’s story worth telling is not that it avoided these challenges, but that it faced them directly and built something resilient.

The Textile Era: John G. Scherf and the Big Shirt (1920s–1990s)

When the last of the great longleaf pines were cut in the 1920s and the sawmills shut down, Andalusia needed a new economic engine. It found one in textiles.

The German Who Built a Shirt Empire

In 1927, a German immigrant named John G. Scherf arrived in Andalusia to serve as president of the Area Chamber of Commerce. What he built over the next four decades would define the city for generations.

Scherf founded the Alabama Textile Products Corporation — universally known as Ala-Tex — and turned it into one of the largest shirt manufacturers in America. At its peak, Ala-Tex employed more than 3,500 people across multiple facilities and produced approximately one million dress shirts per year. For a city that never had more than 10,000 residents, those numbers were transformative.

The Ala-Tex headquarters building still stands at 700 River Falls Street, now home to the Chamber of Commerce after renovation through a public-private partnership. On the Chamber grounds sits the “Big Shirt” monument — a literal oversized shirt sculpture that pays tribute to the apparel industry that sustained thousands of families for seven decades.

Scherf wasn’t just an industrialist. He served four terms as mayor and built Springdale Estate, a Mediterranean-style mansion that now serves as a city event venue. His legacy is complicated in the way all paternalistic Southern industrialists’ legacies are — he created jobs and built the town’s economy, but those jobs were low-wage, repetitive, and offered limited upward mobility. The factories were hot, loud, and demanding. Workers, most of them women hunched over industrial sewing machines for hours on end, earned enough to get by but not enough to get ahead.

The Broader Textile Cluster

Ala-Tex wasn’t alone. Dozens of smaller sewing factories and garment plants operated throughout Covington County during the mid-to-late 20th century. The Opp Cotton Mill, the Micolas Mill, and various contract sewing operations employed thousands more. The work was hard, but it was work — and in a rural county with few alternatives, that mattered.

One of those old sewing factories now houses Big Mike’s Steaks & Seafood, one of Andalusia’s premier restaurants. The adaptive reuse is fitting: you can still see the industrial bones of the building, a reminder that what fed families then still feeds them now, just in a different way.

The Collapse

The decline came fast. NAFTA in 1994 accelerated the movement of apparel manufacturing to Mexico. Then China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam offered labor costs so low that U.S. manufacturers couldn’t compete. By the early 2000s, Ala-Tex and most of the other plants were gone. Thousands of jobs disappeared over a decade. The human cost was staggering — workers in their 40s and 50s with decades of sewing experience found themselves unemployable, their skills suddenly worthless in a global economy.

The empty factory buildings still dot the landscape. Some have been repurposed. Others sit vacant, monuments to an economy that no longer exists.

Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and Unfinished Business

The textile era unfolded against the backdrop of Jim Crow segregation, and Andalusia’s history during this period reflects both the brutality of the system and the courage of those who challenged it.

The Segregation Era

Like every Deep South city, Andalusia was thoroughly segregated through the mid-20th century. Black residents lived in separate neighborhoods, attended separate schools, worshiped in separate churches, and faced systematic exclusion from economic and political power. Covington County’s African American population, historically smaller than in Black Belt counties to the north, nevertheless experienced the full weight of Jim Crow’s legal and extralegal enforcement.

The county’s courthouse arsons — one in 1839, one in 1895 — destroyed records that might have documented the full extent of land theft, fraudulent tax sales, and economic marginalization that Black families endured during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. What we know from regional patterns is that Black farmers faced discriminatory lending practices, were systematically excluded from New Deal agricultural programs (the USDA’s discrimination was later documented in the Pigford v. Glickman settlement), and lost land through a combination of partition sales, tax foreclosures, and outright theft.

The Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement came to Andalusia as it did to the rest of Alabama, though the county’s distance from major urban centers meant that the most dramatic confrontations happened elsewhere — in Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma. Still, local activists organized, marched, and faced down threats to demand their rights.

Ivorey Cobb stands out as a significant civil rights leader in the Andalusia area, though detailed documentation of his work and that of other local activists remains limited in widely available sources. The absence of comprehensive documentation is itself telling — rural civil rights organizing often went unrecorded, overshadowed by larger urban campaigns, yet it was no less courageous and no less essential.

School integration in Andalusia and Covington County followed the slow, contested pattern across Alabama. Federal court orders, community resistance, and the eventual establishment of private “segregation academies” all played out here as they did throughout the region. The transition was painful, incomplete, and left scars that persist.

Today’s Reality

Andalusia in 2026 is more integrated than it was in 1966, but that’s a low bar. The median household income is $26,856 — well below the state and national averages — and the poverty rate stands at 20.6%. Those numbers don’t break down equally. African American families in Andalusia, as across the rural South, face higher poverty rates, lower incomes, and fewer pathways to economic security than their white neighbors. The textile factories that once employed thousands offered the same low wages and limited mobility to workers of all races, but the economic devastation that followed their closure hit Black families harder because they had less wealth to fall back on.

The work of building an equitable community remains unfinished. The city’s recent comprehensive planning process and revitalization efforts talk about creating opportunity and attracting young people back home. Whether those efforts will address the racial wealth gap and create real pathways to prosperity for all residents remains an open question.

World War II and Its Aftermath

World War II pulled thousands of Covington County’s young men into military service. Some came home. Others are memorialized on courthouse monuments and in church records.

The war’s economic impact was indirect but real. Wartime demand for timber, agricultural products, and textiles boosted the county’s economy. The post-war period brought the expansion of Social Security, the GI Bill, and federal infrastructure spending — programs that helped build a rural middle class, though again, Black veterans faced systematic discrimination in accessing benefits.

The Andalusia Health hospital opened in 1966, a product of federal Hill-Burton Act funding that brought modern healthcare to rural communities. Before that, residents who needed hospital care had to travel to Montgomery, Dothan, or Pensacola — a potentially deadly distance for someone having a heart attack or a woman in difficult labor. The hospital remains one of the county’s largest employers and a lifeline for the community.

Manufacturing’s Second Act: Shaw Industries and the Industrial Park

After the textile collapse, Andalusia needed a new strategy. It found one in diversified manufacturing and hard-nosed economic development.

Shaw Industries, the world’s largest flooring manufacturer and a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, operates a significant plant in the Andalusia Industrial Park. Shaw’s presence provides manufacturing jobs that pay better than the old sewing factories did and offers some stability given the company’s financial backing. The flooring industry, tied to housing construction and renovation, has proven more resilient than apparel in the face of globalization.

The 250-acre Industrial Park, owned by the city, has become the center of Andalusia’s manufacturing recruitment strategy. The city builds speculative buildings, offers sales tax rebates, and works aggressively to attract tenants. Covington Casket Company expanded its operations with city financing. Triple H Specialty Company purchased its leased building. It’s a portfolio approach — no single employer dominates the way Ala-Tex once did, which provides some resilience but also means the economic impact is more diffuse.

The challenge remains what it’s always been: attracting industries that pay middle-class wages in an era when manufacturing itself is under pressure from automation and global competition. The city has maintained an A-plus credit rating from Standard & Poor’s and managed its finances carefully, but municipal fiscal discipline can only do so much when the underlying economy struggles.

The Earl V. Johnson Era: Downtown Revitalization (2000–Present)

Mayor Earl V. Johnson has been in office since 2000 — six terms and counting. His tenure has been defined by one overarching project: bringing downtown Andalusia back to life.

The Vision

When Johnson took office, downtown was dying. The old First National Bank Building — seven stories tall, designed by Frank Lockwood, the most prominent structure in town — sat largely empty. Storefronts were vacant. The retail economy had moved to the strip malls along the highways. Downtown was a place you drove through on your way to somewhere else.

Johnson’s vision was to reverse that decline through historic preservation, adaptive reuse, and public-private partnerships. The strategy wasn’t unique — it mirrors the Main Street America model that hundreds of small cities have adopted — but the execution has been persistent and wide-ranging.

The Projects

The Andalusian Hotel: The crown jewel is the boutique hotel being developed in the First National Bank Building. Converting a seven-story 1916 bank building into a modern hotel while preserving its architectural character is expensive and complicated. The project depends on historic preservation tax credits (20% federal, plus state credits) that were enabled when the city expanded the Commercial Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

Adaptive Reuse Everywhere: The old Coca-Cola bottling building is now The B, a tap house with residential space upstairs. The Church Street School (1921–1923) became the Church Street Cultural Arts Centre, housing the Andalusia Ballet, music lessons, and community theater. The Ala-Tex headquarters became the Chamber of Commerce. Everywhere you look downtown, old industrial and commercial buildings are being repurposed.

Heritage Park: A new public park designed by Concordia, a New Orleans architectural and planning firm, is under construction on South Cotton Street near the old train depot. It’s part of an $11 million bond issue aimed at making downtown more walkable and attractive.

The Murals: Artist Wes Hardin of Dothan has painted a series of historic murals on downtown buildings — “The Legend of Andalusia,” “Early Covington County Courthouses,” “Soda Fountain,” and “Early Covington County Timber and Logging.” They function as both public art and storytelling, giving residents and visitors a visual connection to the city’s past.

New Businesses: Big Mike’s Steaks & Seafood, Karel Farm & Meat Market (an old-fashioned butcher shop), the Clark Theater (an upscale movie theater), and other businesses have opened or relocated downtown. They’re not chain stores; they’re local operators betting that downtown can work.

Does It Work?

Downtown looks better than it did in 2000, no question. The buildings are occupied, there are places to eat and things to do, and the streetscape is attractive. The harder question is whether it creates real economic opportunity for the people who need it most.

The revitalization strategy is fundamentally about attracting outside investment and visitors — tourists coming for Christmas in Candyland, retirees looking for an affordable small town with charm, young professionals who might be willing to trade big-city salaries for small-town quality of life. That’s a reasonable strategy for a city Andalusia’s size, but it’s also limited. A boutique hotel and an artisanal butcher shop create some jobs, but not hundreds. They don’t replace what was lost when Ala-Tex closed.

The city’s comprehensive planning process, underway with Concordia consultants, has identified seven public priorities: improved education, youth opportunities, recreation, walkability/bikeability, mixed-income/affordable housing, support for existing businesses, and diversified job creation. Those are the right priorities. Whether the city has the resources and political will to meaningfully address them — especially affordable housing and job creation — remains to be seen.

The Broadband Fight

One of the most revealing recent episodes is the city’s fight over internet service.

In 2023, Mayor Johnson put Mediacom, the cable monopoly serving Andalusia, on notice after residents complained for years about poor service, high prices, and unresponsive customer support. The city began exploring the possibility of building its own municipal broadband network — a move that would make it one of the few cities in Alabama (and the Deep South) to take on the cable monopoly directly.

Mediacom responded by promising improvements and lobbying the Alabama Legislature, which has historically protected cable and telecom monopolies through state laws that restrict municipal broadband competition. Whether Andalusia will successfully build its own ISP or be blocked by state-level lobbying remains unresolved as of early 2026, but the fight itself reveals something important: city leadership willing to challenge powerful corporate interests on behalf of residents.

Good internet isn’t a luxury in 2026. It’s essential infrastructure for remote work, education, telehealth, and business operations. Rural Alabama has been systematically underserved by private ISPs who focus investment on more profitable urban markets. If Andalusia succeeds in building municipal broadband, it could become a model for other rural communities.

What Comes Next

Andalusia in 2026 is a city of about 8,800 people living in the middle of Covington County, 85 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, two hours from Montgomery, three hours from Atlanta. The population is stable but not growing. The median income is low. The poverty rate is high. Young people leave for college and often don’t come back. These are the realities.

The city’s response has been to invest heavily in quality of life — downtown revitalization, parks, festivals, cultural programming, historic preservation. It’s a bet that if you make the city attractive enough, people and businesses will come. It’s also an acknowledgment that Andalusia can’t compete on cost of living with truly cheap places, and it can’t compete on economic dynamism with cities that have universities and military bases and Fortune 500 headquarters. What it can offer is authenticity, history, community, and a slower pace of life that some people value.

The comprehensive plan under development will test whether that’s enough. The city talks about wanting young people to come home, wanting to create pathways to prosperity, wanting to be more than a place people are from. That requires more than festivals and boutique hotels. It requires good schools, good jobs, affordable housing, and genuine opportunity.

Andalusia has survived the loss of the timber industry, the collapse of textiles, and the long decline of rural America. It’s still here, still working, still trying to build something better. That persistence matters. Whether it’s enough remains the open question.

Population and economic data: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; City of Andalusia financial reports; Andalusia City Council transcripts.

Historical context: Economy Deep Dive research file; Encyclopedia of Alabama; local government records.