Map - Eutaw, Alabama (Eutaw)

Eutaw is a city in and the county seat of Greene County, Alabama, United States. At the 2020 census, the population was 2,937. The city was named in honor of the Battle of Eutaw Springs, the last engagement of the American Revolutionary War in the Carolinas.

Eutaw was laid out in December 1838 at the time that Greene County voters chose to relocate the county seat from Erie, which was located on the Black Warrior River. It was incorporated by an act of the state legislature on January 2, 1841.

As the county seat, Eutaw also developed as the trading center for the county, which developed an economy based on cultivation and processing of cotton, the chief commodity crop in the antebellum years. The crop was lucrative for major planters, who depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans and built fine homes in the city. Many have been preserved. Eutaw has twenty-seven antebellum structures on the National Register of Historic Places. Twenty-three of these are included in the Antebellum Homes in Eutaw multiple property submission. The Coleman-Banks House, Old Greene County Courthouse, First Presbyterian Church, and Kirkwood are listed individually. Additionally, the Greene County Courthouse Square District is a listed historic district in the heart of downtown. A nearby property, Everhope Plantation, is also listed in the register.

During the Reconstruction Era, Eutaw was the site of a number of Klan murders and acts by insurgents. The county courthouse was burned in 1868; the prevailing theory for the burning of the courthouse is that it was intended to destroy the records of some 1,800 suits by freedmen against planters, which were about to be prosecuted. On March 31, 1870, the Republican county solicitor, Alexander Boyd, was shot and killed at his hotel when resisting being taken by a masked group of armed Klan members. (An early-20th century historian of the Klan claimed the group was from Mississippi. ) That same night, James Martin, a black Republican leader, was killed near his home in Union, Alabama, also in Greene County.

In the fall of 1870, in the run-up to the gubernatorial election, two more black Republican politicians were killed in Greene County. On October 25, 1870, whites attacked a Republican rally in the courthouse square that had attracted 2,000 black Republicans. The Eutaw massacre resulted in four black deaths and some 54 wounded outside the county courthouse. Most blacks did not vote in the fall's election, which helped the Democratic candidate for governor.

The use of violence and intimidation of blacks continued across Alabama in the Post-Reconstruction era. Lynchings took place in the state, but none were documented in Greene County during this period, according to a 2015 report by the Equal Justice Initiative. This may be attributable to local officials enforcing the rule of law. On May 16, 1892, Sheriff Cullen and Deputy Sheriff E. C. Meredith of Greene County, with aid of a posse, distinguished themselves by going into Pickens County after a lynch mob of about 50 men. The mob had taken African-American suspect Jim Jones from the Greene County jail, saying they were going to hang him in Carrollton for an alleged crime there. Cullen and his posse confronted the mob at gunpoint, and took Jones back to Greene County.