Selma, Alabama: A Town Named From the Poems of Ossian

William Rufus King, who later became vice president of the United States, gave Selma, Alabama, its name, and he took it from a book of poetry. The book was James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, where the hero, Fingal, is the “king of Selma.”

A bluff with too many names

Before it was Selma, this bluff on the Alabama River went through a few names. Thomas McAdory Owen, in his 1921 History of Alabama, says the first record is a French map of 1732, which marks it “Ecor Bienville,” likely after a small fight Bienville had with the Alibamo Indians nearby. Around 1809 and 1810, the few whites living in Alabama knew it as “High Soap Stone Bluff.”

Then came Thomas Moore, a Tennessean who settled on the bluff with his family, grew a little corn and lived mostly off fishing and hunting. Owen puts his arrival in 1815, while Willis Brewer’s 1872 history and Saffold Berney’s 1878 Handbook of Alabama both say 1816. For a while it was Moore’s Bluff.

King’s choice

In 1819 the Selma Land Company was organized. It bought the land and laid out a town of 125 lots and 37 half lots. Owen says “the name Selma was given to the town by Hon. William R. King,” who had given the company the same name. Brewer says the old name was changed “at the suggestion of Hon. Wm. R. King, who took an active part in having it laid out,” and calls the new one a “mellifluous name, the original of which is to be found in Ossian.” The town was incorporated as Selma on December 4, 1820.

King had a hand in more than one beginning. Owen lists him as one of Dallas County’s delegates to the 1819 convention in Huntsville that wrote Alabama’s first constitution, and he went on to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate for most of the next three decades.

What King was reading

In Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, Selma belongs to Fingal. The poems call him the “king of Selma” and talk of “the echoing walls of Selma” and “Selma’s feast.”

“The Songs of Selma” is one section of the book. Its summary says Minona “sings before the king the song of the unfortunate Colma,” and other bards take turns, “according to an annual custom established by the monarchs of the ancient Caledonians.” It opens with something you might not expect behind a town name: Ossian talking to the evening star, “fair is thy light in the west.” Owen allows himself a guess about why King picked it. “Being a man of literary tastes he no doubt took the name from the ‘Song of Selma’ in Mcpherson’s ‘Ossian.’” Henry Gannett’s federal list of 1905 says simply that Selma was “named from the ‘Songs of Selma,’ in Ossian.”

The vice president who came home

King’s own story ends close to Selma. He was elected vice president on the ticket with Franklin Pierce, but he was already ill. Owen writes that he went to Cuba in January 1853 hoping the climate would help, and that “by special arrangement” the oath of office was given to him there by the U.S. consul in March. He hurried home to Dallas County and died there on April 18, 1853. He was buried in a vault on his plantation about three miles south of Selma, and Owen adds that his body and vault were later moved into the town he’d named.

The name also kept traveling. Gannett lists a town of Selma in Fresno County, California, “named from the city in Alabama.” So if you pass through Selma, California, you’re at the far end of a chain that runs back through Alabama to Fingal’s Selma.

Sources & further reading

• Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography (1921). Vol. 2: “Ecor Bienville,” “High Soap Stone Bluff,” Thomas Moore, the Selma Land Company, King naming the town and the company, “no doubt took the name from the ‘Song of Selma’” (p. 1237); King as vice president, the oath in Cuba, his death and burial (p. 1371). Vol. 1: King among the Dallas County delegates to the 1819 convention (p. 368).
• Willis Brewer, Alabama: Her History, Resources, War Record, and Public Men (1872), p. 208. Moore’s Bluff, King’s suggestion, the “mellifluous name” from Ossian’s “Songs of Selma,” incorporation on December 4, 1820.
• Saffold Berney, Handbook of Alabama (1878), p. 81. Moore in 1816, Moore’s Bluff, and the name traced to the Songs of Selma in Ossian.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Selma, Alabama, “named from the ‘Songs of Selma,’ in Ossian,” and Selma, California, “named from the city in Alabama.”
• James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian (1852 printing). “The Songs of Selma,” its summary and opening line; Fingal as “king of Selma.”
• GNIS feature 163940 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Selma; county seat of Dallas County in 1865.