Tuscumbia

City and administrative headquarters of Colbert County, northwestern Alabama, one of the Muscle Shoals area Quad Cities, on the Tennessee River, 10 km/6 mi southwest of Florence; population (1990) 8,400. It has timber mills and fertilizer factories. The birthplace and home of blind and deaf writer and lecturer Helen Keller is here.

The modern city is built on the site of a Chickasaw town burned by American and Cherokee raiders in 1787. In the 1830s the first railway west of the Allegheny Mountains ran from the centre of town to the Tennessee, part of a design to bypass the Muscle Shoals that made Tuscumbia an important river port.