Gardendale: From Jugtown to Garden City
Near Birmingham, Alabama
Gardendale, a northern Birmingham suburb along Jefferson County's ridge, spent its early decades under a very different name. Veterans of the War of eighteen twelve settled here in the eighteen twenties along an old Native American trade route, and the community became known as Jugtown, named for a local factory that turned out jugs and churns. The nickname stuck for decades.
In nineteen oh six, a local schoolteacher named Hettie Thompson Cargo decided the town deserved better and successfully lobbied to rename it Gardendale. The community incorporated as a city on March twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-five. The arrival of Interstate Sixty-Five in the mid nineteen eighties brought new growth along Fieldstown Road and transformed the once-quiet settlement into one of the faster-growing suburbs on Birmingham's northern edge.
