They didn’t call it “the town of Vestavia Hills” yet. But nearly 75 years ago, the people who lived on this rugged ridge knew what they wanted.
On Oct. 24, 1950, just 96 people showed up to vote on whether their scattered mountaintop community — stitched together by new roads, a country club and the first elementary school — should become an incorporated town.
The result was decisive: 88 in favor, eight against. And with that, Vestavia Hills was born.
That history came back to life this spring, as longtime city attorney and former councilman Pat Boone helped walk residents through the city’s early days during a public forum hosted by the Vestavia Hills Historical Society in April. Boone, who has served as both city attorney and attorney for the Vestavia Hills Board of Education across multiple decades, has been in the room for many of the defining decisions that shaped the city’s growth. But this vote, he reminded the crowd, is where it all started.
Boone noted that the town’s footprint at the time was small — about 30 streets, bounded on the north by what is now Vestavia Drive, stretching just past Southwood on the south end and not much farther east than Beaumont. The population stood at 607 people. The vote itself took place at the community’s new elementary school, which had opened just one year earlier on land sold to Jefferson County by real estate developer Charles Byrd. Byrd, a name that would become synonymous with Vestavia’s early development, had helped spark the vision for what this mountain could be.
“We got a rat hole for a school,” Boone told the audience, recalling how local families pushed the county to improve conditions. He described how, after years of frustration, the Jefferson County Board of Education finally bought land from Byrd’s Suburban Land Company and built the new schoolhouse — the one that still stands today as East Elementary opened on Sept. 12, 1949.
That school, alongside the newly developed Vestavia Country Club and Byrd’s early homebuilding efforts, gave residents a reason to believe their mountaintop could be more than a loosely connected patch of subdivisions. It gave them the confidence to take ownership of their future.
“So now we’ve got a new school, and we’ve got a country club,” Boone said. “And Charlie Byrd and his buddies are sitting back and saying, ‘Well, maybe we need a town to go on with these two things.’”
It took 147 residents signing a petition to get the incorporation election on the calendar. When the ballots were counted that October evening, they had their answer.
In the months that followed, the new town elected its first mayor, R.L. Burgess, along with its first council members, setting the foundation for what would become one of Alabama’s most recognized communities.
What followed was rapid change. Just a few years after the vote, the completion of U.S. 31 helped open the ridge to easier access, connecting the new town to Birmingham and beyond. By 1957, Vestavia Hills had passed the 2,000-resident threshold required by Alabama law to automatically shift from a town to a city — a milestone that came not by proclamation, but simply by growth.
As Boone put it plainly at the April forum: “It worked. That’s all I can tell you. It worked.”
Vestavia Hills will officially mark its 75th anniversary in November with a series of celebrations and public events honoring the journey from that quiet 1950 vote to the thriving city it is today. As part of the milestone, the Vestavia Voice will continue to chronicle that history through its ongoing Vestavia at 75 series, running throughout the remainder of the year. Along the way, we’ll revisit many of the moments, people and decisions that helped shape the identity of this place we call home.
