My father and his brother, Hugh P. Stith Sr., who was known as “Bud,” and their father were miners, coal mostly although my father also mined iron ore. That’s why this was one of Dad’s favorite stories.
He told me he took one of his uncles [the man must have been a great uncle], for a ride on Red Mountain, an enormous deposit of iron ore overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, where Dad grew up. This had to be 1915, 1917, somewhere around there.
Photo courtesy of the Vulcan Organization
Red Mountain, together with nearby coal deposits, put Birmingham on the map as a steel producing center [“The Pittsburgh of the South”] and, no doubt, made some families wealthy.
Iron ore mining had begun there during the Civil War but the nearby furnaces were destroyed by the Union Army in 1865. Temporarily, that put an end to the mining.
My father said his uncle told him he had crossed Red Mountain when he walked home from Richmond after the war.
“I could have bought that whole mountain for 15 cents an acre, two acres for a quarter,” his uncle said.
“Why didn’t you buy it!” Dad asked.
“It won’t worth it,” his uncle replied.
Coming Monday: “‘Oh, Copyboy?'”