HYBART, Ala. — Long before he served as a U.S. senator and as the nation’s 84th attorney general, Jeff Sessions was a boy in a Monroe County crossroads where mule wagons still pulled up to his father’s country store. Today, the former attorney general says, that community has just one full-time resident — but his memories of growing up in Alabama’s Black Belt remain vivid.
In a recent conversation about his roots, Sessions described a childhood shaped by hard-working parents, a small but determined school in nearby Camden and a place that has largely faded from the map as roads, railroads and rural economies changed around it.
“Hybart is the community I grew up in,” Sessions said. “My neighbors were Hybarts and the Hybarts lived all around there.”
Jeff Sessions and the Black Belt community of Hybart
Hybart sits in the northwestern corner of Monroe County, near the Wilcox County line, where Alabama State Route 41 meets Monroe County Road 56. It is an unincorporated community so small that no census population figure is reported for it. These days it functions mostly as a pass-through for log and pulpwood trucks moving timber across the region.
The community takes its name from James Willis Hybart, an early postmaster. Before that, the spot was known as Vredenburgh Junction, a meeting point of the Gulf, Florida and Alabama Railway and a logging railroad serving the Vredenburgh Saw Mill Company. The line was later operated by the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway, better known as the Frisco, which ran passenger service between Pensacola and Memphis until 1955. The tracks are now owned by the Alabama and Gulf Coast Railway.
Hybart’s post office opened in 1926 and closed in 1976. In Sessions’ boyhood, however, the settlement was a genuine hub for the surrounding farms.
“There was also a post office and a railroad depot,” Sessions recalled. “Three stores, a post office and a railroad depot in the 1950s. Today there’s only one full-time resident.”
A father’s store at the center of town
One of those three stores belonged to his father, Jeff Beauregard Sessions Jr., a World War II veteran who bought the business after returning home from military service. The younger Sessions spent many hours there with friends, watching his father work to support the family and serve neighbors who often had little cash.
Much of that trade ran on barter. Farm families grew their own corn, shelled it by hand and carried it to the store in flour sacks to be ground.
“He would grind people’s corn and they would grow corn on their place,” Sessions said. “They didn’t have money and they would shell it and put it in a flour sack. I remember seeing them come in with flour sacks of shelled corn by hand. He would take their corn and give back four rings’ worth of cornmeal to make cornbread with.”
The shelves carried a little of everything a rural family might need. Among the goods Sessions remembers:
- Shoes and toys
- Bolts, nails and other hardware
- Medicine
- Coca-Cola and cookies
According to biographical records, the elder Sessions later ran a farm equipment dealership as well.
Family roots dating to 1834
Sessions traces his family’s presence in Alabama to 1834, when the Rev. J.J. Sessions bought 80 acres of land from the federal government. The reverend became a Baptist preacher who traveled the countryside ministering to congregations, and Sessions said he still has the reverend’s diary, in which he wrote about the churches he visited.
Reflecting on that first land purchase, Sessions said it must have been difficult to arrive in a wilderness of trees and clear it into farmland capable of supporting a family for nearly two centuries. He said the people of the Black Belt learned early that making a living — and improving life for others — required steady work.
The Black Belt takes its name from the dark, fertile soil that stretches across the south-central part of the state. Once dominated by cotton farming, the region today is largely rural, with timber among its most visible industries — as the log trucks rolling through Hybart attest.
Mule wagons, sweet gum goals and Sunday football
For a boy in the 1950s, Sessions said, Hybart was close to idyllic. He and other boys from the community worked their way through Scouting, and Sessions earned the rank of Eagle Scout — biographical records date the honor to 1964.
“It was a different time,” Sessions said. “People would come to the store in mule wagons. They didn’t have cars and we just had the best time. We just played and we cut down sweet gum trees and put up a basketball goal. We would play and on Sundays, we’d gather at one of our neighbor’s places and play football until the Bear Bryant and Shug Jordan shows came on.”
The reference will be familiar to generations of Alabamians: the weekly television programs hosted by Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and Auburn coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan were Sunday staples across the state.
A small school in Camden with outsized results
Sessions attended school in Camden, the Wilcox County seat, about 14 miles from home. Despite the distance and limited means, he said, he and his neighborhood friends all found a way to get there each day — and many went far.
Of his group of friends, Sessions said, nine earned four-year college degrees. One became a physician, another earned a doctorate at Clemson University, and Sessions himself went on to law school.
“We had an excellent school, we had good parents, but no money,” Sessions said. “Nobody had any real money, but all the parents were educated.”
The Camden school produced a remarkable roster of state leaders. Among the other notable people Sessions said attended school there:
- Kay Ivey, born in Camden in 1944, who became Alabama’s 54th governor in April 2017 and is the longest-serving female governor in U.S. history.
- Jo Bonner, raised in Camden, who represented Alabama’s 1st Congressional District from 2003 to 2013, later served as Ivey’s chief of staff and became president of the University of South Alabama in December 2021.
- Judy Bonner, Jo Bonner’s sister and a Wilcox County native, who served as president of the University of Alabama from 2012 to 2015 — the first woman to hold that post.
“We had this good school and I think people were taught that they would to do right, study, work hard and take advantage of the opportunities that are out there,” Sessions said. “Camden has produced a lot of good people that have gone on and done real well being such a rural small town.”
A region with a history of powerful figures
Sessions’ corner of the state has a long record of sending leaders to Washington. John McDuffie, born in 1883 at River Ridge in Monroe County, represented Alabama’s 1st District in Congress from 1919 to 1935. He co-authored the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, which set the Philippines on a path to independence. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the federal bench for the Southern District of Alabama in Mobile, where he served until his death in 1950.
Alabama has also produced cultural figures known far beyond the state’s borders, including Bo Jackson, Hank Williams, Helen Keller and Monroeville’s own Harper Lee.
From Hybart to the U.S. Justice Department
Sessions was born Dec. 24, 1946, in Selma. After high school, he graduated from Huntingdon College in Montgomery in 1969 and briefly taught elementary school before earning his law degree from the University of Alabama in 1973. He served in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1973 to 1986, attaining the rank of captain.
His public career ran largely through South Alabama. Key milestones include:
- 1975–1977: Assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, based in Mobile
- 1981–1993: U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama
- 1995–1997: Alabama attorney general
- 1997–2017: U.S. senator from Alabama
- February 2017–November 2018: 84th attorney general of the United States
Sessions was the first sitting U.S. senator to formally endorse Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and was later nominated as attorney general. He resigned from that post on Nov. 7, 2018. In 2020, he sought to reclaim his former Senate seat but lost the Republican runoff to Tommy Tuberville.
During two decades in the Senate, Sessions was known as one of the chamber’s most conservative members, focusing on issues including immigration, public safety, agriculture, military affairs and federal spending.
‘It’s good to know where your roots are’
Through it all, Sessions has held on to his memories of Hybart and the people who shaped him. He has watched Black Belt towns rise and decline with changes in highways, railroads and rural commerce, and he can recount those changes in detail to anyone who asks.
He said knowing where he came from has always given him a kind of steadiness.
“It’s good to know where your roots are. I think it’s a source of confidence or security or something,” Sessions said. “I always figured, ‘Well, if the worst got the worst, I could go back home to the country.'”