Video: Join fine art photographer Keith Dotson making photos of abandoned buildings on a hot day in Uniontown, Alabama
Uniontown is a part of my ongoing series of photographs and videos where I continue to photograph the forgotten and declining places along the backroads of the American South.
Uniontown (population 1,952) was first settled in 1918, under the name Woodville. It was incorporated in 1836, and became the terminus of Alabama’s first road made out of wooden planks, which connected Uniontown to Demopolis, which is 20 miles away.
The Alabama and Mississippi Railroad came through town in 1857.
Like much of the deep South, Uniontown was a cotton growing region, and in 1897 the Uniontown Cotton Oil company was built here to manufacture cottonseed oil. The town had a cotton mill, several cotton gins and warehouses to store the cotton — until — the boll weevils ruined the cotton crops in the early 1900s, and the population began to decline.
Since 2008, there has been a licensed toxic waste dump here — accepting toxic waste from 33 states.
About Kynard’s
In the video, I photographed the front doors of an old building that was last home to a furniture store called Kynard’s West End Supply Company. I don’t have an original history of this building — which would most certainly have been a store of some kind — but there’s a nice hand-painted sign on the window glass that says Kynard’s. Someone has used their finger to write Roll Tide into the dust that has collected on that window in the 18 years since Kynard’s closed forever.
According to the Internet, Kynard’s West End Supply Company was a furniture store that opened in 1976, and it dissolved as a corporation in 2007. Since the name is still on the window, I assume that was the final occupant of this building.
Farming communities like Uniontown are on the decline across the South and the entire United States.
In a 2025 video on his YouTube channel, geopolitical strategist and author Peter Zeihan stated that in 1900, more than 90 percent of Americans worked in the agriculture industry, while in 2025, it’s about one percent.
Uniontown is just one of the hundreds — if not thousands — of tiny towns across the American South that are fading away. It’s been a trend really since the 1970s.
Black and White Photographs of Uniontown
