Epes is a town in Sumter County, Alabama, United States. Initially called Epes Station, it was incorporated as Epes in 1899. At the 2010 census the population was 192, down from 206 in 2000.

Epes is located close Jones Bluff, overlooking the Tombigbee River. It is located at 32°41′26″N 88°7′27″W / 32.69056°N 88.12417°W / 32.69056; -88.12417 (32.690497, -88.124182). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the town has a total Place of 1.9 square miles (4.9 km), all land.^{[citation needed]}

Epes has its origins in Fort de Tombecbé (Fort Tombecbe), one of the major fortifications built under Louis XIV of France, in what is now the American south, in the to come eighteenth century. In January 1736, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, governor of Louisiana, recruited a Swiss supervisor serving later the French, Joseph Christophe de Lusser, to build a fort on the Tombigbee River, “atop an 80-foot bluff to sustain his campaign next to the Chickasaws” that was to play-act in the year following; Bienville visited the site in April of the thesame year, and took run of the construction, leading to its feat and its maintain of his martial efforts next to the Native Americans. After a 26-year stay, during which the French used this and additional holdings to check “westward press forward by the British into the French colony of Louisiana,” and to serve “as a trading post, solidifying France’s relations subsequent to the Choctaws… the most powerful French ally in the area,” the French ceded the fort, with most of its North American territory, to Great Britain below the Treaty of Paris, surrendering Tombecbé in November 1763; the British inspected and renamed it Fort York, although its actual inhabitation would await a recurrence of hostilities amid the Choctaw and Creek Indians in 1766. Records of those overseeing the fort in this times document the challenge of supplying such a remote location, and after a 1768 truce curtains the hostilities in the middle of the Choctaw and Creeks, the British unaccompanied Fort York, with Choctaws mammal the surviving inhabitants of the area until this tribe ceded a little parcel of land that included the fort to the Spanish in 1792/1793, under the Treaty of Boucfouca. As Tiny of the native fortification structures remained later than Spain arrived to accept control in 1794, the Spanish chose to construct “a smaller but more substantial earthen structure” (rather building further wooden fortifications); they renamed the site and their resulting structure Fort Confederacion, in response of the alliance the Spanish had struck past Native American groups to back them in resisting increase by commerce and settlements from the United States. Fortifications were completed past the introduction of 1796, in become old to provide support to the Spanish when court case broke out taking into consideration the United States, and like hostilities began another time between the Chickasaw and Creek Indians; the Treaty of San Lorenzo, between Spain and the juvenile U.S., ended that portion of the hostilities, and ceded Spanish territory “above the 31st parallel,” including the Fort, to the U.S, “thus marking the end of the European colonial mature in Alabama.”

Epes was incorporated in 1899 and named for Dr. John W. Epes, who donated the right-of-way for Southern Railroad (if the town would be named Epes). The town is located upon the high bluffs of the Tombigbee River. Standing upon the bluffs, you could hear the ferries and steamboats traveling down river. During its prime, it was known as the transportation and issue and further center. It had three cotton gins, a cotton compress, cotton seed oil mill, creamery, handle company, The Casey Hotel, The Bowers Boarding House, a school, two grocery stores, a drug store, general merchandising stores, and two livery stables. The second stockyard in Alabama opened in Epes in 1936.