In the late 1870s, Jefferson County, Alabama, and the town of Elyton (near the future Birmingham) became the focus of a remarkable industrial and mining revolution. Together with the surrounding counties, the area was penetrated by railroads. Surprisingly large deposits of bituminous coal, limestone, and iron ore—the exact ingredients for the manufacture of iron and, later, steel—began to be exploited. Now, with transportation, modern extractive techniques, and capital, the region’s geological riches began yielding enormous profits. A labor force was necessary to maintain and expand the Birmingham area’s industrial boom. Many workers were native Alabamians. There was as well an immigrant ethnic work force, small but important. The native and immigrant laborers became problems for management when workers began affiliating with labor unions and striking for higher wages and better working conditions. In the wake of the management-labor disputes, the industrialists resorted to an artificial work force—convict labor. Alabama’s state and county officials sought to avoid expense and reap profits by leasing prisoners to industry and farms for their labor. This book is about the men who worked involuntarily in the Banner Coal Mine, owned by the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company. And it is about the repercussions and consequences that followed an explosion at the mine in the spring of 1911 that killed 128 convict miners.

An important story of one man's life, lived with courage and principle.

The gripping story of the 1894 Alabama coal miners strike The Alabama coal miners’ strike of 1894 to gain improved working conditions and to protect themselves from wage reductions. The authors recount the depression of the early 1890s, which set the stage for the strike, and the subsequent use of convict labor, which became a catalyst. The gripping story of the strike includes the dramatic decision to strike and corporate attempts to break the strike by the use of company guards and “scab” labor. In Alabama corporate bosses inflamed passions further by deploying African American “black leg” workers, ultimately requiring the deployment of the state militia to restore peace.

Not all acts of creation begin with an idea narrowly pursued to its logical end. Cause and consequence are difficult to keep in balance and we sometimes produce more than we intended. The minor act of this book proceeded along a planned route that produced both the expected and the unexpected. With the friends of childhood growing old around us, it seemed plain to all that we were entering the last act of living (a long act, we trust), and if there was any summation that we wished to make this was an admirable time to do it. Very few of us live in the town in which we were born, but the influence of that town still lives within us. Time suggests that, depressions and war included, we had a different childhood from so many others, and that an account of those early years might be tremendous entertainment for our group. We would not force others to sit through the tedium of our verbal slide show, although we welcomed any who cared to look. So the rosters of childhood were studied and we sought to contact our old friends with pleas for contributions. We were far more successful than we had any right to be, and Time Has Made a Change in Me offers the reminiscences and the essays of our town and our time. Our oldest contributor at the age of 96 begins the story with her coming of age in the 1920s, while our youngest (and they are in their sixties) recount living the years of childhood in a time of devastating national and international events. Although these outside forces affected us, we lived within the reference of our town and its inhabitants. We knew of other worlds but our horizons were limited. Montevallo, Alabama offered a curious cultural mixing of social elements. The town sits almost exactly on the southern edge of the mineral belt, the source of the iron and coal that helped to fuel the ambitions of the New South. Our geographical anomaly was well illustrated by the fact that Montevallo was an area of rocks and red clay, while only miles to the south there were sandy soils and peach tree orchards. We had our small farmers trying to make a living on marginal cotton lands and our stories recount cases where families left the farm and moved to town to find a source of livelihood. And then the college came. The Alabama College for Women was never very large in our day, but its influence on the town was pervasive. It meant that hundreds and hundreds of young ladies shared our space, and a hard cadre of professors raised our level of social and educational expectations. Sometimes this produced two levels of society, each suspicious of the other, at other times a social mixing occurred much like what happened in the army under Selective Service. All of this gave a new dimension to our lives: a broader view and a more tolerant attitude was usually the end result. When we put all these pieces together (from over thirty contributors) we discovered that we had produced exactly what we meant to and something else that we had not planned to do at all. While we wrote of a little town turned inward on itself, we wrote as well on the universal theme than transcends space and time. Everywhere and at all times little children go through the process in which consciousness is imprinted with the values and views that make us what we are. In this sense all can appreciate this account and it will have all readers remembering and considering their own childhood and its influence and effect. This book is fun to read not simply for the adventures and misconceptions of the youthful mind, but for the intense personal view that the writers bring to their subject. We see through their eyes and we can remember the innocence that very slowly evaporated as we adopted the guise of maturity. All of this is age looking at youth and it is about as far as we can go to see our lives in their total perspective.

This history of the Alabama penal system describes how the state responded to the national penal reform movement of the 19th century, documenting basic and important differences between penitentiary experiments in the antebellum South and the New South. The political struggle to establish a state penitentiary in Wetumpka, near Alabama's geographic center, began in the late 1830s. Opened in the early 1840s, the prison housed white men and a few women; since slaves were considered property, punishment for most slave crimes was left to their owners. The facility manufactured such goods as boots and shoes, hats, wagons, clothes, and cigars and was expected to compete with civilian industry. Inexperience and faulty administration took their toll, and the prison soon showed large losses. Though the penitentiary was turned over to private leasees in 1846, both systems of management were inadequate--under each, prisoners frequently escaped, manufactured goods never competed successfully with private enterprise, and prisoners suffered high mortality rates from poor living conditions and disease. The state resumed control during the Civil War and finally made a profit because of the heavy demand for manufactured products for Confederate troops--knapsacks, tents, and wagon covers. The prison closed at the end of the war, and in the postwar years the state operated the infamous convict leasing system that allowed private parties to "rent" and house state and county convicts under contracts. Subject to appalling abuses, the postwar convict lease system was a black mark on the state's history. A modern study of prison reform, this work demonstrates that Alabama's penitentiary system was established in direct response to the humanitarian prison reform movement that swept the country in the first half of the 19th century. In fact, Alabama's penitentiary was modeled on the state prison in New York, and many aspects of both northern and southern state penitentiary systems were adopted by Alabama. Based mainly on newspapers, legislative journals, and newly accessible prison records, the book opens the door to a reexamination and reinterpretation of southern--and, in particular, Alabama's--prison systems. Robert David Ward is professor emeritus of history at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. William Warren Rogers is professor emeritus of history at Florida State University in Tallahassee. They are coauthors of Alabama: The History of a Deep South State.