While downtown West Blocton is a shell of its former self, the place isn’t a ghost town. Neat, well-kept houses line most of Main Street west of downtown and newer houses dot the fringes. It’s still home to more than 1,300 people. And the fact that they have stayed when there is little left to hold them may be more remarkable than the town’s decline.
Carey Scurlock remembers sitting on the store counter where his mother worked and pulling the hand crank on the cash register when she rang up a sale.
“We stayed open until 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday,” Scurlock, 41, said. “And you couldn’t find a parking space on Main Street. It was a booming little town before the mines closed.”
Today, that’s hard to picture. Many Main Street stores are empty, and business is hardly booming for those that remain. The sidewalks are empty.
“One by one, the owners died out, and the stores closed,” Scurlock said. “It’s sad, it really is. I’ve worked all my life with this organization or that to build it up. You take two steps forward and three steps back.”
While downtown West Blocton is a shell of its former self, the place isn’t a ghost town. Neat, well-kept houses line most of Main Street west of downtown and newer houses dot the fringes. It’s still home to more than 1,300 people. And the fact that they have stayed when there is little left to hold them may be more remarkable than the town’s decline.
“They could have given up and let the town fold a long time ago,” Mayor Jesse Reese said. “But they stayed here and stuck with it.”
The town’s biggest problem is that people have few places to work. Beyond the school system, the biggest employers are Jones Overhead Door and First State Bank of Bibb County. Both employ less than 20 people, and the bank will soon move its headquarters to Bessemer.
“To get a real job, you have to leave here,” said Cessa Mayfield as she huddled in front of a space heater inside the New Main Street Cafe, one of downtown’s few businesses. “My husband works in Hoover.”
Family ties keep most people there.
“That’s what keeps me here,” Katrina Canterbury said. “My husband was born and raised here.”
It is the ultimate irony that West Blocton is now a town populated by people who don’t work there. Jobs are what once brought people to West Blocton.
Unlike most of the towns in West Alabama, West Blocton doesn’t predate the Civil War, and its economy wasn’t founded on agriculture. It is a “New South” industrial town founded on coal mining, said Charles Adams, a West Blocton native and author of an impressive town history, “Blocton: A History of An Alabama Coal Mining Town.”
According to Adams’ history, two Yankee entrepreneurs, Truman Aldrich and Cornelius Cadle, studied Alabama Geological Survey maps and recognized that the area held vast coal deposits. In 1883, they founded the Cahaba Coal and Mining Co., acquired the area and pushed a railroad 8 miles through the hilly, rocky countryside. The area had long been ignored because it was virtually worthless as agricultural land.
In the 19th century tradition, the men built a company town around the mine, complete with a company store, worker housing, churches, schools and just about everything the miners needed.
They named the town Blocton, for the enormous blocks of coal, some weighing thousands of pounds, which were pulled from the rich seams being mined.
Blocton, the company town, began about where Main Street ends today and encompassed about 8 square miles. West Blocton sprang up on land owned and subdivided by Uriah Smith. Since it was west of Blocton, he called it West Blocton. The town existed from the mid-1880s and incorporated in 1901.
U.S. Steel eventually acquired the mines. The towns reached their zenith between 1900 and 1920, with the populations exceeding 4,200 between them.
Most West Alabama towns were populated by native-born Anglo or Celtic whites and former slaves. West Blocton’s booming industrial economy attracted immigrant Italians, Slavs, Germans, Eastern European Jews and the Welsh.
“There was such a cosmopolitan population that there was even a Welsh Congregationalist Church,” Adams said. “When I grew up, in my neighborhood, there were three or four German-speaking families within two blocks of me.”
Italians made up the largest portion of the white ethnic minorities. An Italian Catholic cemetery with tombstones inscribed in Italian still exists today east of town. They lived in Blocton’s Little Italy, which, in less politically correct times, was called Dago Hollow. The stone community oven where the families baked their bread is still there.
“They were more ostracized than the blacks,” Adams said. “There was a constant little bit of culture clash.”
It was also during this time that the area earned the reputation as “Bloody Bibb.” Violence was a part of life in the tough mining town.
The mines churned out coal during World War I to feed the American war machine. But going into the 1920s, labor unrest began to take its toll on the town. Fire destroyed downtown in 1927. And when the stock market crashed, the wheels of industry slowed, cutting the demand for Blocton coal.
The industry revived with World War II but then began a slide that continued through the 1950s and `60s. During the 1950s, the town lost the last traces of its ethnic diversity, Adams said. The last local mining operation ceased in 1976.
A quarter century later, West Blocton is a coal-mining town without a coal mine. Adams said one man suggested “The Town That Refuses to Die” as the title for his book.
“We need to be able to attract some kind of business that will provide jobs for people,” said City Councilman Paul Province, a bank vice president whose last name harks back to Blocton’s Little Italy community.
“We’ve been a bedroom community since the demise of the coal industry. We live here, but we work somewhere else.”
Reese is placing his hopes for growth on a new sewer system. He knows that development follows sewer service. And he said the town is primed for residential growth spilling out of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.
Located about 7 miles south of Interstate 20/59 halfway between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, West Blocton is well located for commuters.
“We’re where Shelby County was 15 years ago,” he said. “They’re bulging at the seams. They don’t have anywhere else to go. They have to come here.”
While townspeople would welcome newcomers, they don’t want to give up their small town flavor.
It’s the kind of place where the annual Mt. Carmel Baptist Church Turnip Green Supper before West Blocton High School’s homecoming game attracts as many as 400 people. And down at the drug store, people know pharmacist Mitch Ames and his assistant, Daphne Pierson, by name.
“I try to speak to them and call them all by name,” said Pierson, daughter of Bibb County Sheriff George Fleming. “Everybody likes to feel special.”
Customers remember, too.
“Especially around Christmas,” Pierson said with a smile. “We get lots of goodies and homemade cookies and candy.”
Ames drives down from Birmingham because he likes the independence he wouldn’t have at a large chain store. The store holds to some venerable traditions.
“We’re still one of the few businesses that allow people to charge,” Ames said, adding that the store doesn’t open any more new charge accounts. “As long as they pay their bills on time, we don’t charge them any interest.”
And he knows some of his customers can’t always make it into the store.
“If you need something and we’re not busy, I’ll run it out there and drop it off to you,” Ames said.
Social life in town revolves mostly around church and school. The Tigers, the West Blocton High School athletic teams’ nickname, even shows up in some business names, like Lemley’s Tiger Hut.
In May, the Cahaba Lily Festival attracts nature lovers who venture down to the river to see the unique flower. The 3-foot tall plant with a stunning white bloom grows abundantly in the Cahaba and its tributary, the Little Cahaba.
The town hopes to turn the “beehive coke ovens,” where coal was turned into coke for steel making, into a park. They are some of the last surviving examples of their kind.
Once the sewer system is in place, Reese said he hopes that he can use West Blocton’s assets as selling points to businesses and commuters.
“We’ll see some growth,” Reese said. “There are going to be some better times for us.”
Reach Robert DeWitt at robert.dewitt@tuscaloosanews.com or 345-0505, Ext. 287.
FAST FACTS ABOUT WEST BLOCTON:
Population:
1990: 1,468
2000: 1,372
Largest employers: Bibb County Board of Education, Jones Overhead Door, First State Bank of Bibb County.
Beginnings: West Blocton was founded in the 1880s next to the company-owned town of Blocton. The towns get their name from the enormous blocks of coal pulled from the Cahaba Basin coal seams. West Blocton’s non-agrarian history is unique in West Alabama and the community was a melting pot of European immigrants, former slaves and Confederate veterans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Highlights: West Blocton hosts the Cahaba Lily festival every year in May to celebrate the unique flowers blooming. Its Wild West Days celebration commemorates the town’s rowdy past. The beehive coke ovens west of town are some of the last remaining of their type.
Little-known fact: West Blocton was almost named for a Yankee general. Gen. Walter Quinton Gresham was the Union officer who Lt. Col. Cornelius Cadle, one of West Blocton’s founders, served under during the Civil War. Cadle originally called the town Gresham. Charles Adams believes the name was changed because Blocton was full of Confederate veterans who didn’t take kindly to the name.
Those interested in knowing more details of West Blocton’s history can obtain a copy of the “Blocton: A History of an Alabama Coal Mining Town” from the Cahaba Trace Commission office at Brierfield State Park and at Tannehill State Park.