This city developed around a fort of the same name, built in the 1830s to intern the Cherokee tribe who were being rounded up by the military before being forcibly removed to Indian Territory in 1838 on what they called the Trail of Tears.

At the beginning of the 21st century, it still had 7000 workers in 100 mills producing varieties of socks, nearly half the world production.

[3] This settlement was commonly called Willstown after its headman, Will Weber, who had striking red hair.

He had come to North America as a British soldier and became close to Mohawk people at the Grand River Reserve in Ontario, where he served as an interpreter.

Although European Americans had pressed for Indian removal in the Southeast because they wanted land to cultivate, by the 1860s, the city of Fort Payne and the surrounding area were only sparsely settled.

Development of cotton plantations and larger settlements had taken place in the uplands region known as the Black Belt.

With no strategic targets nearby, during the Civil War only minor skirmishes between Union and Confederate forces took place here.

With the completion of rail lines between Birmingham and Chattanooga that went through Fort Payne, the city's growth was stimulated by connection to this new transportation route.

[6] In the late 1880s, Fort Payne's growth was stimulated after the discovery of coal and iron deposits, needed to support industrialization.

Many of the notable historic buildings in Fort Payne date from this period of economic growth and prosperity, including the state's oldest standing theater, the Fort Payne Opera House; the former factory of the Hardware Manufacturing Company (today known as the W. B. Davis Mill Building, now the location of the Fort Payne Depot Museum, and formerly the passenger station for the present-day Norfolk Southern Railway.

Following the decline of passenger traffic in the mid-20th century as people took to automobiles, today the depot serves as a museum of local history.

Beginning in the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement lowered tariffs on textile products imported into the United States, resulting in large increases in sock imports.

By the early 2000s a very large, highly-efficient centre for sock production had grown up around Datang, Zhuji in Zhejiang Province, China.

The American companies’ strict negotiating positions required the Datang producers to accept as little as 3% profit.

As American retail corporations began to source their products from China, Datang became the new "Sock Capital of the World.

In the 1990s, facing the international threat to their manufacturing, business and civic leaders in Fort Payne began to take steps to diversify the city's economy.

The largest was the 2006 construction of a distribution center for The Children's Place stores, a facility that employed 600 people in its first phase of operation.

Cloudmont Ski Resort on Lookout Mountain generates man-made snow as winter temperatures permit.

In the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak of 1994, an F3 tornado passed just west of the city[20] Occasionally, a hurricane that has made landfall in the Gulf of Mexico will reach Fort Payne as a tropical storm or tropical depression.

[21] The 1993 Storm of the Century dumped more than 20 inches (51 cm) of snow on Fort Payne, immobilizing the city and the surrounding area for days.

Fort Payne is also near Mentone, a popular mountain resort area known for summer children's camps, rustic hotels, restaurants, and cabins.