Biohazard Cleanup Near Smithfield Birmingham, AL

Birmingham was founded on June 1, 1871, by the Elyton Land Company at the planned crossing of two railroads, and it was deliberately named after Birmingham, England, the industrial city its founders hoped to imitate.

Birmingham grew where it did because it is one of the few places on Earth where coal, iron ore and limestone - all three ingredients of steel - occur within about a ten-mile radius of each other.

Birmingham's explosive early growth earned it the nicknames 'The Magic City' and 'Pittsburgh of the South,' and it is the seat of Jefferson County in Jones Valley, one of the southernmost valleys of the Appalachian chain.

Birmingham had 200,733 residents in the 2020 census and an estimated 195,893 in 2025, across about 88,788 households averaging 2.12 people each.

Birmingham's Vulcan statue, a 56-foot figure of the Roman god of the forge, is the world's largest cast-iron statue; sculpted by Giuseppe Moretti for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, it now stands atop Red Mountain overlooking the city.

Birmingham's Sloss Furnaces, preserved as a National Historic Landmark, is a surviving relic of the pig-iron industry that built the city.

Birmingham was a center of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' there in 1963, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that September killed four young girls and helped galvanize passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is Alabama's single largest employer, with more than 28,000 employees, and has replaced steel as the city's primary economic engine.

Downtown Birmingham was reborn around Railroad Park, a 19-acre green space that opened beside the rail lines the city was founded on.

Birmingham's Rickwood Field, which opened in 1910, is the nation's oldest ballpark.