First known as Muckle Ridge, the city was renamed for a hero of the American Revolution, Francis Marion.

In 1822 the city was renamed in honor of Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox," hero of the American Revolutionary War.

General Sam Houston, while between terms as 1st and 3rd president of the Republic of Texas, married Margaret Lea of Marion in the city in 1840.

In December 1857, Andrew Barry Moore (1807–1873) of Marion was elected the sixteenth governor of Alabama (1857–1861).

Marschall offered three designs, one of which became the "Stars and Bars," the first official flag of the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.

Hal Kemp, a jazz alto saxophonist, clarinetist, bandleader, composer and arranger was born in Marion in 1904 and died in Madera, California, following an auto accident in 1940.

A number of significant events occurred in Marion relating to the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1958 Jimmy Wilson, a black man, was sentenced to death by a jury in Marion for stealing $1.95 from Estelle Barker.

[6] Wilson's case became an international cause célèbre, covered in newspapers worldwide and inspiring over 1000 letters per day to the office of governor Jim Folsom.

Finally, after the Alabama Supreme Court upheld Wilson's conviction, at the urging of the Congress of Racial Equality, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wrote to Folsom explaining the damage that the case was doing to the international reputation of the United States and Folsom quickly granted Wilson clemency.

During a Southern Christian Leadership Conference march on the evening of February 18, 1965, during the height of the Selma Voting Rights Movement, Marion resident Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler.

[8] Jackson died on February 26 of an infection stemming from his wounds at nearby Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma.

[15] The historic jailhouse was the location of Reverend James Orange's incarceration, which sparked the 1965 march that resulted in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson.

The jail is currently under renovation for the conversion into a museum, however a grand opening date has not yet been announced.

In 2009, Marion made national news when a three-year-old family feud turned into a 150-man riot outside the town's city hall resulting in the arrest of eight people and the hospitalization of two.