Woodstock was first settled in the 1820’s, with a formal land grant to William Houston on Feb. 27, 1826, and the settlement was established along the old Tuscaloosa to Huntsville Stage Coach Line. It got its name when Dr. J.U. Ray named it after the home of his ancestors, Woodstock, England; Dr. Ray’s American ancestors had arrived from England at Jamestown, Virginia. In 1870, Dr. Ray built the first depot for the newly constructed Alabama-Chattanooga Railroad, and after the Alabama Great Southern Railroad came the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, each operated a depot in the area. In 1872, a line was installed down to West Blocton to ship the large abundance of coal found there, and Woodstock became a break and storage yard for coal, red and brown iron ore, and cotton. After the Civil War, rich iron ore deposits were mined, and in 1872 Mr. Giles Edwards moved to Woodstock from Tannehill and built a blast furnace to manufacture pig iron. He was later joined by his son-in-law, James W. McQueen, who went on to become president of Sloss-Sheffield Iron Company in Birmingham. Along with iron ore mining, coal mining, and farming, a jug factory was built to use the area’s large deposits of fire clay, which was made into bricks, jugs, pots, and churns. As many as eight trains per day stopped in Woodstock, carrying away its riches, six of them carrying mail. Woodstock was also the roots of a newspaper business in the 1800s; that publication moved to Six Mile and then to Birmingham, where it became the Birmingham News. The town was formally incorporated in 1996 as North Bibb with Carl Jones as mayor, and it formally changed its name back to the Town of Woodstock by Ordinance 2008-08-03, effective October 1, 2000, with S. B. Albert Hutchens as mayor.