Cullman — the Ave Maria Grotto, German Heritage & a Covered Bridge

Fifty minutes north of Birmingham sits Cullman, a town founded in 1873 by a Bavarian refugee, Colonel John Cullmann, as a colony for German immigrants — a heritage still legible in its street grid, its churches, and its beer gardens. The centerpiece of the day is the Ave Maria Grotto, four acres of the Benedictine abbey grounds landscaped with 125 miniature stone reproductions of the great buildings of the world, built over half a century by a single self-taught monk, Brother Joseph Zoettl. After a downtown lunch amid Cullman's restored brick storefronts and its living German traditions, the afternoon drives out into the countryside to the Clarkson Covered Bridge, a 270-foot timber-truss span from 1904 set above a wooded creek. It is a small, deeply peculiar, and quietly moving corner of Alabama.