Homewood: The Suburb That Cholera Built

Homewood exists because Birmingham got sick. A cholera epidemic struck the young industrial city in eighteen seventy-three, and residents who could afford to leave began looking for higher, healthier ground in the surrounding countryside. Speculators followed, laying out residential communities on the ridge just south of downtown.

Over the following decades a cluster of small neighborhoods took shape: Rosedale, Grove Park, Edgewood, and Oak Grove. Edgewood had its own electric railway to Birmingham by nineteen eleven and an artificial lake by nineteen fifteen. On October twenty-ninth, nineteen twenty-six, Edgewood, Rosedale, and Grove Park merged and incorporated as Homewood. The name fit the aspiration, a wooded place where people made homes away from the smoke and crowds of the steel city. Hollywood, the adjacent community to the east, was annexed three years later. Today Homewood is one of Alabama's most prosperous suburbs, still separated from Birmingham by the same ridge that made it feel safe in eighteen seventy-three.