Champion Mines
Alabama
The hills around you here once fed the furnaces of Birmingham. Brown iron ore was mined here, and the place came to be called Champion.
Railroads changed everything. In eighteen eighty-nine the Blount County seat moved from Blountsville to the new rail town of Oneonta. In the twentieth century, the Shook and Fletcher company worked the Champion and Taits Gap mines, shipping ore north to the Woodward, Sloss, and Tennessee Coal and Iron furnaces in Birmingham, and to Republic Steel in Gadsden. The ore that built a steel city came out of quiet ground like this.
