The peak

By 1914 there were more than six hundred men going underground at Brookside every morning, which is worth sitting with for a second, because four years before that the same mine had been down to fifty four. On the hillside above them Sloss ran two hundred domed brick ovens, built shoulder to shoulder so they would hold each other's heat and charged through a hole in the roof. A town grew to serve all of it. By 1900 Brookside had a railroad depot, dry goods stores, a drugstore, and more than one saloon, and its first school went up that same year. Cardiff took its charter in January 1900 with more than 560 people, several stores, two blacksmith shops, and a saloon of its own, and in 1911 it put on a street tax of two dollars and fifty cents a year that paid for road work all the way to 1946. By 1910 Slovak families made up roughly 37 percent of Brookside, and in 1916 that community finished the St. Nicholas building you can still go and see. Nearly everything these three towns still get measured against was built, counted, or finished inside these twenty years, which is also why the last entry lands the way it does. Cardiff's downtown burned on 20 July 1919, and the town's fortunes turned down with it.