The message of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was first preached on the steps of the Montgomery County courthouse in 1839, and by August, 1842 small congregations had been organized in Tuscaloosa and Perry counties.
Among the earliest Latter-day Saints to go west were those of the “Alabama Company,” a group of about sixty converts— men, women and children— from Alabama and Mississippi who headed north in February 1846. Not knowing the date or timing of a larger movement out of Illinois, which in fact took up “winter quarters” on the Missouri River, they pushed cross-country, beating Brigham Young to Ft. Laramie by nearly a year. In July 1847, several dozen members of this Southern company were among the first to enter the Salt Lake Valley, and a prominent Valley community was named after a company leader, Lamar County’s Jack Holladay.
Because of the move west, an LDS presence in the deep south was not to be found again for several decades.
Church membership in Alabama began to rise in the early twentieth century. A 1904 report placed the membership in Alabama at 1148. A Sunday school was organized in Montgomery in 1911, and another in Birmingham in 1920.
By 1930 small congregations had been established in Bessemer, Birmingham, Bradleyton, Camden, Clayton, Decatur, Dothan, Elmont, Falco, Lamison, McCalla, Mobile, Montgomery, Pine Hill, Selma and Sneed.
After World War II, membership in the state increased. Montgomery gained the state’s first Latter-day Saint chapel in 1955. The Huntsville area experienced an especially rapid Church growth in the next decade, much of it from an influx of Latter-day Saints associated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
In 1969 the first stake (a “stake” is a group of congregations similar to a diocese) in Alabama was organized in Huntsville. In the 1970s additional stakes were organized in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile.
By 1980 there were 14,000 members of the Church living in the state. Current Latter-day Saint membership in Alabama is more than 27,000 in six stakes with 69 congregations.
In October 1998 the Church announced plans to build a temple in Birmingham, the Church’s 98th worldwide.
