Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Brookside, AL

Brookside is a town in north-central Jefferson County, Alabama, a former coal mining town with a population of 1,253 at the 2020 census.

The town takes its descriptive name from Five Mile Creek, which flows through it on its way to the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River, and its first settlers arrived in the area as early as 1838.

Brookside grew up around the Brookside Mine, opened in 1886 by the Coalburg Coal and Coke Company and bought a year later by the Sloss Iron and Steel Company to supply coal for its Birmingham blast furnaces.

The mine was technologically advanced for its time, with a Robinson-Ramsey coal washer installed in 1897 and rows of beehive ovens that turned coal into coke, and Brookside served as headquarters for four Sloss-owned mines: Cardiff, Coalburg, Brazil and Brookside.

Facing a labor shortage, Sloss recruited miners from what was then Czechoslovakia, giving Brookside an unusually large Eastern European immigrant population for Alabama, and the number of miners at Brookside peaked at around 600 in 1914.

Brookside's miners were tightly organized and carried out a successful strike in 1906, at a time when mine owners elsewhere played skilled and unskilled workers against each other.

St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, founded in 1894 with its onion-domed building completed in 1916, was one of the first Russian Orthodox churches built south of the Mason-Dixon line and still serves a small congregation in Brookside.

The church's annual Russian/Slavic Food Festival, held the first full weekend of each November, draws visitors for church tours, traditional dances and Eastern European food prepared by the Sisterhood of Saint Olga.

The 1920 Alabama coal miners' strike, combined with a worldwide drop in coal prices, shut down the Brookside mine, and it never reopened after the strike was settled in 1921.

The town was incorporated in the late 1890s, and the 2020 census counted its 1,253 residents in 496 households.