Leeds is a tri-county municipality located in Jefferson, St. Clair, and Shelby counties in the State of Alabama and is an eastern suburb of Birmingham. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 12,324.

Leeds was founded in 1877, during the supreme years of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era. It housed the workers and their families of Lehigh, a Portland gum manufacturing plant.

The War of 1812, geography, geology, and three cultures shaped the chronicles of Leeds. Lying at the crossroads of ancient Native American paths in the middle of Alabama, Leeds drew European settlers and their African-American slaves to a estate of fertile growing seasons and rich sources of coal and mineral ore. The to the front settlers built churches and schools as soon as many permanent in Cedar Grove, Oak Ridge, Ohanafeefee and Mt. Pleasant. The principal survey of Leeds was entered into Jefferson County Map Book 10, page 21, in 1908. The settlement, dating to 1818 and incorporating upon April 27, 1887 as “Leeds”, has existed along the banks of the Little Cahaba River; beside an historic stagecoach route; and along two large railroads for the greater allocation of American History.

James Hamilton, a Scottish-Irish American veteran of the War of 1812 and first sheriff of Shelby County, settled in Cedar Grove in 1816. John Richard Ingram Pashal Stewart, a Cherokee English college and American veteran of the War of 1812, settled at Ohanafeefee Village c.1840. At Oak Ridge in 1820 or 1821, European settlers formed Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the first CPC congregation in middle Alabama. By 1887, the native railroad pioneers included free African-American settlers who came to feat at the Leeds paste plant and the Central of Georgia as the Georgia Pacific railroads. Some gravitated to historic Mt. Pleasant Church where a handful of freed slaves had founded Scott City, Hillard Holley, Ciscero Davis, Jeff Harris, and Bill Johnson started Leeds Negro/Primary School in 1921.