 Hackleburg, a small town in Marion County, on the Illinois Central Rail- road, 17 miles northeast of Hamilton, the county seat, and 76 miles north- west of Birmingham, got its name because the community was “overrun” with a weed called hackle, which was said to be fatal to sheep.
Big Bear Creek, which flows northward to the Tennessee River, near the northwest corner of Alabama, runs within one mile of Hackleburg. Population in 1940 was 492, a drop from 628 in 1930. The name was given the town by a Tennessee sheep drover who lost several of his animals driven into a patch of the hackle weed, to his sorrow. According to reports of the incident the weed ruined the fleece and caused the death of many of the sheep, so the Tennessean, in his wrath, gave the name of the weed to the settlement and it has clung to it ever since. Hackleburg is at the intersection of the Russelville Pike and the old Allen’s Factory and Iuka Stage Coach Road. Indians were numerous in this section when the first white settlers arrived and carvings made by them on stones and trees still existed until quite recently. The town was built near a large spring from which the domestic and commercial water supply is obtained, and distributed by the waterworks. Robert Cochrane, of Mecklenberg, N.C., is said to have been the first white settler in the community, the Kennedy, Self and Frederick families following soon afterward.
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West Alabama History 