Athens First Methodist Church

Tomorrow we will have a special blessing over all our students, teachers, and school staff members returning to school next week! Please bring your backpack to service for this time of blessing and prayer. See you tomorrow!

Athens is one of the oldest towns in Alabama, chartered in 1818, a year before Alabama itself became a state. It sits in Limestone County in the far north, built around a classic courthouse square that still anchors the whole town.

The town was named for Athens in Greece, a nod to learning, and it lived up to it early by founding a female academy that eventually grew into Athens State University, among the oldest institutions of higher learning in the state. During the Civil War the town was occupied and even sacked, a hard chapter it survived and rebuilt from.

Today Athens is best known for its music. Every fall it hosts the Tennessee Valley Old Time Fiddlers Convention, one of the biggest gatherings of its kind in the country, filling the square and campus with banjos, fiddles and buck dancing.

For a town that predates the state around it, Athens still feels lively and lived in, its old square carrying more than two hundred years of north Alabama history.