Mining our history
The stories of the people who once pulled ore from the belly of Red Mountain are captured in an oral history project organized by Red Mountain Park Commission.
See the Park Before it Opens
Guided hikes, one short, one long, are offered by park staff on the third Sunday of each month through April 2010. The park is also hoping to do more with its “Topic Tours” series, which focuses on different aspects of the park and appeals to different groups, including historical tours, nature and wildflower tours, and birdwatching.
Upcoming Dates:
- Nov. 15
- Dec. 20
- Jan. 17
- Feb. 21
- March 21
- April 18
Time: All tours depart at 2 p.m. Plan to arrive 15 minutes before the tour departs to sign waiver forms and meet the guides. Allow about three hours for the longer tour and 1.5 hours for the shorter tour.
“It was a sight—there wasn’t nothing else like it,” begins Amos Horton, a former Red Mountain miner who worked the No. 10 Wenonah mine from the late 1940s to its closing in 1962. “It was a sight of progress, people working— lot of people working. Camp was full of people. The commissary there on Saturday would be full of people telling their experiences in the mines.”
Decades later, what was a scraped and bare landscape of heavy equipment, mining buildings and camp housing is covered in trees and brush—the lives of the men and women who extracted the ore that built this city, armed fighting forces and built the Panama Canal are all but invisible. But Red Mountain Park, in its efforts to secure thousands of acres of property for recreation and community connectivity, has begun to collect the stories, images and artifacts that will remind Birmingham of what made its magic. It was no sleight of hand. It was the hard work of the men and women of the mines around Red Mountain.
The oral history project organized and begun by Red Mountain Park, in collaboration with UAB and Samford University, began in June 2009. It will be an ongoing effort that will continue until the park opens in the next few years. Photographer Melissa Springer’s portraits of the miners and their families, along with the audio and video recordings of their stories and the collection of mining artifacts, will be on display in the visitor’s center when the facility opens to the public.
With its recent acquisition of two historic cemeteries, Red Mountain Park, located along Lakeshore Parkway between the old mining communities of Wenonah, Ishkooda and Spaulding, has grown its footprint to an impressive 1,100-plus acres, making it the second largest urban park in the nation (only Central Park in New York City is larger). When it opens to the public sometime in the next few years, the park will offer visitors a unique perspective on Birmingham, combining a recreational destination with an historical and cultural experience that is unlike anything else in our greater region.
What began this journey toward a park that commemorates Birmingham’s rich industrial history was the purchase in 2008 of a large parcel of land from U.S. Steel. Now under the direction of the Red Mountain Park Commission, the 4.5-mile-long park area, while not yet accessible by roads and paved walkways, is open to the public through a series of guided hikes led by park ranger Eric McFerrin and other guides. Visitors can see firsthand many of the mine entrances and old roads that were once part of a massive landscape of men and equipment focused solely on extracting ore from Red Mountain. Eventually, the entire area will be navigable by trails and pathways, with significant sites left intact so visitors can get a sense of what life was like in the mines and surrounding mining communities.
Red Mountain Park Executive Director David Dionne moved to Birmingham from Annapolis, Md., to spearhead the project. He sees the park as a site that can present both Birmingham’s history as an industrial powerhouse as well as its future as a community dotted with and connected by green spaces, an irony not lost on the park staff or commission. “You’re looking at taking the story of what built Birmingham, the economic engine of the 19th and 20th centuries, and adding to that the story of what we can become—a destination for nature lovers, a city where you can park your car and travel entirely by bike, which could be our economic engine for the 21st century,” he says. To Dionne and others involved with the park, what makes it special is that it is not something limited to our immediate community. “Yes, this is a local story,” he admits. “But this is a national story, an international story. This is a place that began during the Civil War but helped win World War II. It birthed the Civil Rights Movement. People will be drawn to that, no matter where they are from.”
Perhaps most significantly, the park’s location, right across Lakeshore from the Oxmoor Valley and Ross Bridge golf courses, along a popular biking corridor, and not far from the Shades Creek Greenway and Jemison Trail, makes it ideal for recreation. As Dionne envisions it, the greenway and trails throughout Mountain Brook could eventually be connected down Shades Valley to the park site, and bike paths could line Lakeshore. That scenario may be a long time off, but until then, the trails within the expansive Red Mountain site offer hikers, runners and cyclists a landscape to fully explore, all within Birmingham city limits.
With much still to do, Dionne says he and his team are “making steady progress” to opening day. Traffic studies will tell him how roads should be reworked and where entrances should be located. Continual investigation of the property will help identify trail routes and picnic areas. And having the community come and visit the site throughout its development will provide valuable feedback as the commission finalizes its plans.
Dionne says most important will be the visitor’s center, where photographs, documentary film footage and audio recordings of the miners who lived and worked on the property will be on display. A grant from the Alabama Humanities Foundation will fund the portrait photography. As the miners become older and more frail, it is imperative that their memories are captured for future generations. Many Birmingham residents have no idea that what is now a dense woods was once a large and thriving network of mines and communities. When it opens, Red Mountain Park will show the city both its rich heritage as a manufacturing boom town and its potential as a nature and recreation destination.
