Leighton is a town in Colbert County, Alabama, United States. It is portion of the Florence – Muscle Shoals Metropolitan Statistical Area known as “The Shoals”. At the 2020 census, the population was 665. Leighton has been hit by several tornadoes in the 2000s, including a damaging EF2 upon May 8, 2008, that was caught upon tape flipping higher than many cars and damaging buildings.

The first settlers in what is now Leighton arrived in the further on 1810s. The community was initially known as “Crossroads” for its location at the intersection of two in front stage coach roads. The proclaim was difficult changed to “Leighton” for town’s first postmaster, the Reverend William Leigh. The town developed as a cotton shipping center in the 1830s after the Tuscumbia, Courtland and Decatur Railroad constructed a railroad stock through the area. Leighton incorporated in 1890.

Leighton originally straddled the county extraction of Franklin and Lawrence Counties. When Colbert County was carved off in 1867, the town yet remained estranged between the supplementary county and Lawrence. On the 1880 U.S. Census, it reported having 196 residents upon the Colbert County side and 83 upon the Lawrence County side. After the 1890 Census, Colbert County’s eastern be stuffy to was expanded eastward several miles to Town Creek, placing Leighton wholly within Colbert.

In 1909, an African-American man named Sam Davenport was lynched by a mob of some two dozen men in Leighton. Davenport was suspected of afire a white man’s barn.