Sylvester started as a beautiful nowhere in 1893 and was first called Isabella Station. When the Brunswick and Albany Railroad came through southwest Georgia, the county seat was Isabella, which is located three miles north of the railroad.
It really is an incredibly long distance -- a lightyear is roughly 6 trillion miles or nearly 10 trillion kilometers. Here's how you calculate it. You start with the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second. Then you multiply that by 3,600 seconds in an hour. Then you multiply that by 24 hours in a day.
A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or: 186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year. A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles (9,460,800,000,000 kilometers). That's a long way! Using a light year as a distance measurement has another advantage -- it helps you determine age. Let's say that a star is 1 million light years away. The light from that star has traveled at the speed of light to reach us.