Heritage
Archive →Graysville, Cardiff, and Brookside sit in a row along the last stretch of Five Mile Creek, and all three of them are here for the same reason. Somebody found coal under the farmland, could not hire enough men to dig it, and went looking in Wales, then in Scotland, and then on the far side of the Austro Hungarian Empire. What came back was a Russian Orthodox parish in Alabama, families from four countries living in a town of a few hundred people, and three places that have been arguing with the water ever since.
Everything here names where it came from, and where a date is not known it says so plainly. There is a good chance somebody reading this knows an answer these pages do not.
Seven chapters
1830s to nowWhat follows is the whole run in order, from the first farms on the bottomland to the greenway that goes over the old rail bed. Each chapter takes a stretch of years and sets the three towns inside it together, because they happened to each other. The mine at Cardiff opened six years before the one at Brookside. Graysville lost its charter seven years after the Brookside mine shut.
Each chapter opens onto its own page, where the full dated record for those years is kept, every entry carrying the source it came from and a link to go and read it. The record is not evenly thick and the count under each chapter says how thick: Brookside was a Sloss town and got written about, Graysville was neither, and some decades of it are close to blank.
The three towns
West to eastThe same three places side by side, which is the comparison the chapters keep making and this is the short version of. They were built for different reasons and they went different ways, and that is the part that gets flattened when people say the coal towns. Graysville had a gin, never belonged to a company, and is the largest of the three today. Cardiff was one mine and is now fifty two people. Brookside was Sloss from the ground up, and the parish those miners founded still serves dinner every November.
This is assembled reading rather than original research, and the difference is worth being plain about. Everything here comes from material that is public and online: the Encyclopedia of Alabama, Bhamwiki, Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, the Freshwater Land Trust, and the marker standing on the roadside in Cardiff. Every entry carries the one it came from with a link, so none of it asks to be taken on trust.
That leaves a great deal out. When a chapter says something is not recorded, it means it has not turned up in any of those, not that nobody ever wrote it down. Courthouse deeds, church registers, company payrolls and the boxes in people's closets are mostly not on the internet, and a good deal of what actually happened in these three towns is only in them. Where the sources disagree with each other, which they do on a couple of the population counts, this page follows the census.
So if you know one of these answers, there is a fair chance you know more about it than this page does. That is not a problem with the page so much as the shape of the thing, and it is why the address at the bottom is there.
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Fill in a gap
If you have a photograph, a date, a name, or a story about any of the three towns, send it. Corrections are just as welcome as additions, and this page gets better every time somebody who was there writes in.
fivemilec@gmail.com