Franklin is a rural town in Macon County, Alabama, United States. The 2010 census placed the population at 149, unchanged from 2000.
The Creek Indians (Muscogee people) had long been cultivating lands in this area, producing crops of maize, squash and beans (the Three Sisters), and tobacco, used primarily for ritual purposes. Osceola (1804-1838), who became well-known as a leader of the Seminole people in Florida, was born to a Creek woman at Red Creek, 10 miles from the Tallapoosa River. He was of mixed race but identified as Creek; the people have a matrilineal kinship system.
Franklin has been home to many churches for more than 200 years. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a Methodist Missionary Church operated here for the Creek. It had two cemeteries, one for whites and one for the Creek. James McQueen, a Scots trader who lived here and married a Creek woman, was great-grandfather of Osceola. McQueen is buried in the Indian cemetery.
After the Creek were forced to cede their lands, European Americans developed the area for cotton cultivation. They depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans, many of whom were initially transported to this region from the Upper South in the domestic slave trade.