Editing Calhoun County, Alabama (section)

==History==
'''Benton County''' was established on December 18, 1832, named for [[Thomas Hart Benton (senator)|Thomas Hart Benton]], a member of the [[United States Senate]] from [[Missouri]]. Its [[county seat]] was [[Jacksonville, Alabama|Jacksonville]]. Benton, an enslaver, was a political ally of [[John C. Calhoun]], a U.S. senator from [[South Carolina]], and also a slaveholder and planter. Through the 1820s-1840s, however, Benton's and Calhoun's political interests diverged. Calhoun was increasingly interested in using the threat of [[secession in the United States#Confederate States of America|secession]] as a weapon to maintain and expand [[slavery in the United States|slavery]] throughout the United States. Benton, on the other hand, was slowly concluding that slavery was wrong and that the preservation of the union was paramount. On January 29, 1858,<ref>{{cite book |title=Acts of the Sixth Biennial Session of the General Assembly of Alabama held in the City of Montgomery, Commencing on the Second Monday in November, 1857. |date=November 1857 |publisher=N. B. Cloud, State Printer |location=Montgomery, Alabama |page=318 |url=https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1857-1858/Acts_1857_1858/page/n317/mode/1up |access-date=November 23, 2021 |quote=No. 306. - AN ACT - To change the name of Benton county to Calhoun.}}</ref> Alabama supporters of slavery, objecting to Benton's change of heart, renamed Benton County as '''Calhoun County.'''

During the [[Reconstruction era]] and widespread violence by whites to suppress black and white Republican voting in the state during the campaign for the 1870 gubernatorial election, four blacks and one white were [[Lynching in the United States|lynched]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Shapiro|first=Herbert|title=White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SXGn2uPGJ6EC&pg=PA12|year=1988|publisher=U of Massachusetts P|isbn=9780870235788|page=12}}</ref>

After years of controversy and a State Supreme Court ruling in June 1900, the county seat was moved to Anniston. <!-- What were the grounds and issues of the case? -->

The county was hit by an F4 tornado during the [[1994 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak]] on March 27, 1994. Twelve minutes after the [[National Weather Service]] of [[Birmingham, Alabama|Birmingham]] issued a tornado warning for northern Calhoun, southeastern Etowah, and southern Cherokee counties, the tornado destroyed [[Piedmont, Alabama|Piedmont]]'s Goshen United Methodist Church.