Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Brighton, AL

Brighton is a small city in Jefferson County, Alabama, just east of Hueytown in the Birmingham–Hoover metropolitan area.

Brighton was officially founded in 1892, when developer G. B. Edwards subdivided a tract of land and sold off lots; before that, the settlement was known as Woodward Crossing.

Early settlers of English descent named the town after Brighton in East Sussex, England, and it is one of four Jefferson County cities named after cities in Great Britain.

The town grew up along a dummy railroad line built in 1889 by the Bessemer & Birmingham Railroad to link Bessemer and Birmingham, and the Old Huntsville Road through town became its Main Street.

Brighton was incorporated in 1901, by which time at least 100 families lived there, and a post office had operated under the Brighton name since 1894.

The city's fortunes were tied for decades to the Woodward Iron Company and nearby coal mining; after the company left in the late 1970s, Brighton's population fell steadily from its 1980 peak of 5,308.

The 2020 census counted 2,337 people in 1,180 households in Brighton, down from 2,945 residents in 2010 and 3,640 in 2000.

Brighton is a majority-Black city: in the 2020 census, about 77 percent of residents (1,805 people) were Black or African American, and about 17 percent were Hispanic or Latino.

In 1908, Black coal miner and union activist William Miller was lynched by a mob in Brighton after being falsely linked to a bombing that anti-union whites had actually carried out.

In 2015, working with the Equal Justice Initiative, Brighton placed a historical marker honoring Miller near City Hall — the first city in Alabama to install such a memorial.