Woodlawn is the name of a community in northeast Birmingham, in Jefferson County, Alabama, United States.HistoryPresent-day Woodlawn was settled by a group of farming families who entered the area in 1815, just as it was opened to settlement by the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The community took its name from the Wood family, headed by Obadiah Wood (1753-1849) and his son Edmond Wood (1791-1865), from Greenville, South Carolina. The site they chose was a well-watered section of Jones Valley along the Georgia Road which extended deep into what was then still part of the Mississippi Territory.Edmund was granted 1200 acres (5 km²) of Obadiah's holdings on which to raise his family. It was on that property that the town of Rockville was formed in 1832 - a small cluster of houses near the roadside. The first railway came through the valley in 1870, at which point the settlement was renamed Wood Station and began to grow. By the end of that decade a private "Woodlawn Academy" had been founded to educate the children of the communities 89 residents. In 1884 the Georgia Pacific Railway began offering service into the rapidly growing city of Birmingham, about 4 miles to the west.In 1891 the State of Alabama granted a municipal corporation to the "City of Woodlawn," the name chosen by its first citizens to honor the Wood family, who remained active in civic affairs. In 1895 the first City Hall and Jail were built and by the end of the century the population was 2,500. A second, larger City Hall was built at the turn of the century, along with schools, churches, a fire station, and library. The grand gothic-inspired Woodlawn High School opened in 1922.
