Alabama's first permanent state capital from 1820 to 1826, Cahawba grew into a wealthy cotton-shipping town where, by 1860, enslaved African Americans made up nearly two-thirds of Dallas County's richest population. The surviving Barker Slave Quarters, built to house some of the roughly 1,500 people enslaved in Cahawba by 1860, stand alongside the ruins of grand plantation homes. Ground-penetrating radar surveys in 2019 identified 215 unmarked graves in the town's enslaved burial ground, and researchers have since identified 37 of those buried there by name using estate records. After the Civil War, freedmen who remained in the declining town organized politically at the old courthouse, and Cahawba resident Jeremiah Haralson, born enslaved, became the only African American to serve in both houses of Alabama's legislature and in Congress.