Tuscumbia moving forward with new welcome center

The City of Tuscumbia, as well as State Representatives Kerry Underwood and Jamie Kiel, announced a new multi-million-dollar project in July, a brand-new welcome center to be built near the Alabama Music Hall of Fame on U.S. 72.

On Dec. 16, Mayor William Foster announced that bids had come back for the project.

“We have been working on this for about five years now,” he said. “It’s been a while. We have just now acquired the bids about a week ago. Luckily for us, of the five bids, four came in under budget.

“That gives us the green light to move forward, so we are pretty excited about it. We are working on the paperwork to be able to award the bid, and then we will be ready to put shovels in the ground (for the groundbreaking).”

The new North Alabama Welcome will have a few things that set it apart from similar buildings in other parts of the state.

According to architect Brad Bernard, the welcome center has been designed to be both accessible and informative. Given its prospective location in Tuscumbia, some of the design choices were done with Helen Keller in mind.

“This building is designed around the legacy of Miss (Helen) Keller,” he said. “You will see bits of Ivy Green in this design. You’ll see a lot of stuff, especially once it’s built and you get inside, that not only accommodates people who are deaf and blind, it privileges them. There are a lot of textures inside.”

Braille, a system of writing and reading for those who are vision impaired using a series of raised dots to represent letters of the alphabet, will be featured in different ways inside and outside the center.

“We are going to have all the Braille letters on one side of the building, and we are going to have a Braille phrase on the other side. So, you have to go all the way around the building to figure it out,” Bernard said.

The building will include several restrooms “like any good welcome center should,” lots of information on local attractions provided by the Colbert County Tourism Bureau and office space for Tourism as well.

“It feels so exciting,” said Susann Hamlin, executive director of Colbert Tourism. “These things take time, but now that we know the project is moving forward, we will be counting the days. Our current facility is nice, but it’s on the smaller side. This is like a big Christmas present.”

The target date for completion of the project is March 6, 2026.

“The new welcome center will be in Tuscumbia, but it will benefit all of The Shoals and the entire state,” Foster said. “It’s going to help everybody, and we’re fortunate it will be in Tuscumbia.”