Woodlawn Historic District

About this property

Woodlawn, Alabama is a community in Jefferson County, Alabama, which is now a neighborhood within the city of Birmingham, Alabama. It grew as an independent community, and became the City of Woodlawn, and built a substantial City Hall building in 1908, but was annexed by Birmingham in 1910. The community area experienced a surge of growth after it was annexed. The Woodlawn Historic District in Birmingham, Alabama is a 241 acres (0.98 km2) historic district which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. It included 608 contributing buildings and a contributing site, as well as 89 non-contributing buildings. It comprises much of the original city of Woodlawn, including its city hall, but the district also reflects much development after it was annexed into Birmingham. The boundaries were defined to include "surviving portions of the Woodlawn neighborhood which retain sufficient historic character and resources to convey a sense of the district's historical development. Areas excluded from the district generally possessed higher ratios of noncontributing to contributing resources." Woodlawn Fire Station (c.1930), romantic French revival style Woodlawn Methodist Church (1909–12), Victorian Gothic Revival style (Destroyed by fire on May 31, 2009). Woodlawn High School (1922), Tudor Revival style, with an associated gymnasium and stadium Wood Family Cemetery (1824), only resource documented to be older than 1880, The district is roughly bounded by 1st Ave. N, 47th St. N, 61st St.N, and Interstate 20/59. It includes Queen Anne and various late 19th and early 20th century Revival styles. The Hawkins, Riley, Eubank and John Smith families arrived in 1815-16 and may have been the first European-descended settlers in the area. Early houses included "Woodlawn", the home of Obadiah Washington Wood Sr. on the Georgia Road, and "Willow Wood", residence of Edmund Wood, which was located where Willow Wood Park is now. O.W. Wood Sr. established the first general store, the first post office (in 1832, when the community was known as Rockville), and first saw mill in the area. He also granted "rights of way for railroad and streetcar construction, and donat[ed] land for four churches, a school, and for the settlement of former slaves at nearby Zion City. A church shared by all denominations in what were known as "Union services" was built on land donated by Obadiah Washington Wood, Sr., at what is now 56th Street and Second Ave., where the Woodlawn Elementary School was later located. The Wood Family Cemetery holds about 150 graves starting around 1824, including those of seven generations of the Wood family, from Obadiah and Edmund Wood on. The cemetery is about 2 acres (0.81 ha) on 57th Street North at First Avenue.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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