Champion Mines, Our Fathers' Mines

This book is a compilation of information and stories about the lives and times of the miners of Champion and Tait’s Gap mines and their families. It tells the history of Champion, a mining camp community in Blount County, near Oneonta, Alabama, and the lives and times of its miners and their families. Feel and see how miners struggled to live on only seven months of work a year and how their school and church helped them during the hard times in the southern Appalachian mountain camp. The book recounts growing up in an isolated place with one tree swing and a company commissary store. It describes events of the camp and the railroad running through it. Here is a collection of history, museum material, and information from the miners and their descendants, their families, fathers, sons, grandfathers, fathers-in-law, and grandsons who worked the mines.