Heritage

Coalburg is the oldest of these and the largest any of them got, and it starts with Mack Holmes. Holmes had been enslaved. He took up an 80 acre tract here at a dollar and a quarter an acre under the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 and farmed it, along with other land he had bought in North Birmingham. When it was worked out that his tract sat over what was called a magnificent vein of coal, Holmes leased the mineral rights to John T. Milner's Milner Coal, Iron and Railway Company for $250 a month.

Milner is worth a second of your time here. In the late 1860s he published an argument for keeping Black laborers in what he called a semblance of bondage, and that argument is more or less the convict lease system that later filled this mine. He made more than $200,000 selling Coalburg. Standing for the state senate twenty years on he campaigned against convict leasing, and told a crowd that the principal object of his speech was the great necessity of maintaining white supremacy in the South.

Milner sold out in 1883. The mines at Coalburg and New Castle went to the Georgia Pacific Railway along with 13,000 acres of Richmond and Danville Construction Company land, for more than $200,000. The railway set up the Coalburg Coal and Coke Company, put Edward M. Tutwiler in as superintendent, and a post office opened here the same year and ran until 1932. Tutwiler went on to open mines at Brookside, Blossburg, Cardiff and Brazil, and Sloss ended up with all of them. The company that opened the Brookside mine in 1886 was called Coalburg Coal and Coke.

Sloss worked Coalburg with prisoners leased from Jefferson County, about 320 of them at the peak in 1889, bringing up 4,000 tons a day. Men were arrested on small charges, sold to the company, and sent underground. Nearly all of the county's prisoners were Black. Thomas Parke published a scathing report for the Jefferson County Medical Society on the conditions they worked in, and in 1895 put the death rate at Coalburg at 90 men for every 1,000 prisoners. Between 1899 and 1902, more than 100 leased men died there. Most of their names are gone.

A powder magazine blew up inside the mine on March 3, 1890 and killed eleven men. The county coroner, Alfred Babbitt, and the Alabama Board of Penitentiary Inspectors looked into it. Edward Tutwiler, who ran the place for the railway and then for Sloss, lived in a cabin among the laborers and went to every workers meeting, and contemporary accounts praise him for it. His wife Mary died at Coalburg in 1885. There were 214 coke ovens at Coalburg by 1900, and in 1889 Sloss had put in a bank of 63 mechanically charged ovens of a patented design that the Library of Congress survey reckons may have been the first of its kind in the country. The census counted 842 people here in 1890, more than Brookside and Cardiff had between them.

Coalburg is largely inside Birmingham now, in the Hooper City neighborhood, just north of where I-22 meets Coalburg Road.

The Equal Justice Initiative has written about convict leasing in Jefferson County, and Coalburg is in it.

Republic was called Warner first. The Pioneer Mining and Manufacturing Company opened its first mines in the back half of 1898, and the two it started with were Sayreton and the Warner slope here. By 1900 Warner was the largest coal producer in Jefferson County. In 1901 it sent out 344,357 tons on its own, which was more coal than every mine in Alabama put together had raised in 1880.

Republic Iron and Steel bought the company in 1899 and the place took the new owner's name. The post office opened as Republic in 1903 and ran to 1968. There is a photograph of a slope mine here from 1908, captioned for the Warner Coal Company.

Republic is unincorporated and it has not been quiet about it. In 2011 Graysville asked the legislature for leave to annex more than 2,000 acres in northwest Jefferson County, including Republic land that does not touch the Graysville line, along Forestdale Bend Road and Cherry Avenue. People in Republic and Watson objected and the bill never came to a vote.

The creek level on this site comes from Republic. The gauge there is the only one left reporting live water anywhere in the watershed, so every time you check the creek here, you are looking at Republic.

New Town sits a few hundred yards off the water between Coalburg and Brookside. The US Geological Survey's names file carries it and OpenStreetMap carries it, and that is all that has turned up. It is not in the University of Alabama's list of Jefferson County places, there is no post office on record for it, and no date has come to hand for when anybody started calling it that.

Dogtown is in the University of Alabama's list of Jefferson County places with a map reference beside it and no remark, which is that list's way of saying the name is real and the compiler had nothing to add. The names file puts it on the bank between Republic and Mineral Springs. No post office, no founding date, and no account of who was there has turned up.

Mineral Springs first appears on a map dating from 1908. That is the whole of the record in the sources this page uses. There is no post office on file for it and nothing that says what was at the spring.

Watson had a post office from 1903. These sources do not say when it closed or who Watson was, though the building was still standing to be photographed in 2021.

Watson is unincorporated and turned out against being annexed. When Graysville went to the legislature in 2011 for land along Forestdale Bend Road and Cherry Avenue, people here objected alongside Republic, and the bill died without a vote.

Scarlet Town is carried by the US Geological Survey's names file and by OpenStreetMap, a few hundred yards from the creek above Brookside. It is not in the University of Alabama's list, and no post office, date, or account of it has turned up anywhere else.

Daisey City first appears on the 1983 edition of the county highway map, spelled with an e, which is also how the names file spells it. Nothing older than that has turned up in the sources this page uses.

Brookside is named for the creek that runs through it. The Coalburg Coal and Coke Company opened the mine in 1886 and Sloss bought it the year after, and the town took its charter in 1898. The census counted 380 people here in 1890 and 1,253 in 2020.

Brookside’s miners were United Mine Workers, and in July 1908 more than a thousand of them drove thirty deputies back out through the Jefferson Tunnel. That fight, and the strike the state broke to end it, are in The peak.

Pinkney City is the odd one here, because it has census figures and almost nothing else. The census counted 358 people in 1910 and 177 in 1930. The University of Alabama's list has the name first appearing on a map dating from 1922, which is later than both of those counts, and nothing found so far says who Pinkney was or what the place was built around.

The Crocker family settled here in the 1830s and sold the land in 1880 to two coal prospectors, Isaac Price and James Williamson. They opened the Cardiff mine, and Price, who was Welsh, named it for home. The labor came from Wales and Scotland and also from France and Italy, and the place grew quickly once Sloss took the mine over. The post office opened in 1890 and the charter came in January 1900, the year 562 people were counted here. In 2020 it was 52.

Cardiff still has its own ZIP code, 35041, but the mail has come through the Brookside post office since the creek flooded in 2003. The town hall was damaged in that flood. In October 2017 eight residents petitioned Judge Alan King to dissolve the municipality.

Blossburg is named for Blossburg in Pennsylvania, which was a coal town first. It was one of the mines Sloss had opened or bought by 1893, and it ended up the largest of them for coke: 350 ovens by 1900, against 214 at Coalburg and 99 at Brookside. The census counted 692 people here in 1890, more than Brookside and Cardiff had between them. The post office ran from 1889 to 1968, close to eighty years for a place that never filed a charter. The mine outlasted Sloss's interest in it. Erskine Ramsay, the engineer who put the coal washer into Brookside, held Blossburg in his own portfolio and folded it into the Pratt Coal Company when he reincorporated that in 1902.

Graysville was Gintown before it was Graysville, after the only cotton gin for miles around, and the name it took instead was a local family's. It is the one of the three that never belonged to a company, and the only one that has had to incorporate twice: chartered in 1897, stripped of the charter in 1927 for inactivity, and chartered again on November 17, 1945, mostly so it could build itself a water system. The post office opened in 1942. The census counted 319 people here in 1900 and 1,950 in 2020.

It still runs its own gas and water utility, and put a gas flame and a water tap on the town seal to say so.

Alden was built as a mining camp in 1928 by Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron, for the men working its Flat Top mine. That makes it the last place on this creek put up around a mine, and it went up nearly fifty years after Coalburg. The company built 160 houses and a concrete man way 981 feet long running down to the mine entrance. The post office ran from 1934 to 1981.

The name came out of a conversation between the superintendent, Howard Thomas, and the chairman, Hugh Morrow, who had offered fifty dollars for a good one. Thomas suggested his daughter's. Ruth Alden was ten years old, and she was guest of honor at the opening gala.

Linn Crossing has gone by four names. It was Chetora and it was Ono. Its own post office ran from 1887 to 1895, a Linn post office took over in 1895, and an Ono post office ran from 1895 to 1906. Nobody has turned up who Linn was.

The creek has been sampled at Linn Crossing since June 1964, and that station's record runs to 2006. Those readings are in the creek room with everything else taken off this water.

Chetopa first appears on the 1937 edition of the county highway map, and it is a different name from Chetora, which was Linn Crossing just down the road. The names file carries a Chetopa Mine impoundment about a mile east of it, so there was a mine. Nothing found so far dates it or says who worked it.