Sylvan Springs

Sylvan Springs is located in Jefferson County in north central Alabama. It has a mayor/council form of government.

The town arose in an area where a few families had settled in the 1880s and built the Old Grove Methodist Church. The town was first known as Hoagtown, for William T. Hogan, stepson of early

settler Dudley Goolsby. The residents renamed it Sylvan Springs for a nearby source of fresh water. It was incorporated as Sylvan Springs on May 22, 1957. The town lies atop the Black Warrior Basin and deposits of coalbed methane and is surrounded by wells from which the valuable natural resource has been extracted since the early 1980s.

The population in Sylvan Springs at the time of the 2010 Census was 1,542. Of that number, 97.3 percent reported itself as white, 1.4 percent as African American, 0.7 percent as two or more races, 0.5 percent as American Indian and Alaska Native, and 0.5 percent as Hispanic or Latino. The median household income according to Census estimates is $58,854 and per capita income is $26,782.

According to Census estimates, the Sylvan Springs workforce is divided among the following major industrial categories:

· Educational services, and health care and social assistance (20.8   percent)
· Manufacturing (15.7 percent)
· Construction (13.9 percent)
· Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing (8.3   percent)
· Transportation and warehousing, and utilities (7.7 percent)
· Retail trade (7.4 percent)
· Professional, scientific, management, and administrative and waste   management services (6.3 percent)
· Wholesale trade (5.0 percent)
· Other services, except public administration (4.7 percent)
· Public administration (4.1 percent)
· Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and extractive (2.5 percent)
· Arts, entertainment, recreation, and accommodation and food services   (2.5 percent)
· Information (1.0 percent)

Public education in Sylvan Springs is administered by the Jefferson County School System. There are no schools in the town itself.

Located northwest of Birmingham, Sylvan Springs is accessed by State Highway 269. The town is fewer than 20 miles to the west of Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.

Sylvan Springs has a community center adjacent to several baseball diamonds.