After the coal

Seventy years is a lot to put in one chapter, and it belongs in one because the three towns spent it going three different directions. Cardiff emptied. It had counted 562 people in 1900 and counted 146 in 1930, because underground mining was going out and strip mining did not need a town around it. Graysville did the opposite, and did it on purpose. It reincorporated on 17 November 1945 mainly so it could build and run its own water system, held its first council meeting in the old schoolhouse that January, set up a gas board in 1949 that is the Municipal Gas System today, and built a town hall, a jail, and a fire station across the 1950s. Mines and steel mills were drawing families in from all over Alabama, so Graysville laid out its first subdivisions to hold them, and the 1960 census found 2,870 people there, more than any count before or since. Through the 1980s and 1990s it kept growing by annexing unincorporated county land, which is why it covers 16.07 square miles now, about seventy six times the size of Cardiff. Brookside did neither of those things. It put up a city hall in 1953 and reached its own highest count, 1,409 people, in 1980, sixty years after the mine closed.