Docena Community, Adamsville & Ensley Roads (Junction 65), Birmingham

Source document Quoted word for word from HAER ALA,37-BIRM.V,6-. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

This report is based upon written documentation donated by the Birmingham Historical Society reformatted to HABS/HAER guidelines.

Historical Overview

Prior to Docena was the site of Booker City, a black community organized around educational facilities established about by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in Alabama. In the church exchanged the site for 30 acres in Vinesville (now Fairfield) and in reorganized the school as Miles Memorial College, in honor of Bishop William H. Miles. Development of the Docena (derived form the Spanish for the number 12) mine began in Until a stockade for convicts who worked at the No, 12 Pratt mine was located on what is Second Street, Docena, today. Old-timers vividly recalled seeing the convicts march in straight columns up to the Frisco Railroad stop and board trains for Sloss' Flat Top Mine. In TCI discontinued the practice of convict leasing.

By this year, 70 miners were employed there and 237 others worked in positions outside the mines. By wartime demand swelled the labor force to 825 persons, most of whom lived in the community with their families. In the early as many as persons were employed at the Docena mine. Docena Village, referred to in a TCI (Tennessee Coal & Iron Company) "Key to Progress" photograph of January 3, as the No. 12 mine camp layout, is designed adjacent to a large central park and playground. Located on the park were a commissary (called a mercado in keeping with the Spanish theme of the vi1lage), a schoolhouse, a church shared by Baptists and Methodists, teachers' cottages and residences for the store manager, superintendent and chief accountant.

Miner houses were located along a regular grid DOCENA COMMUNITY HAER No, AL-76 (Page 2) between First and Sixth Streets, with blacks living on Sixth Streets and on the fringes. A clubhouse and masonic meeting lodge was situated on a high Knoll at Eighth street. The earliest houses constructed were the four-room square-tops intended for one or two families. As the community grew, bungalows of varied design and two and three-room doubles were built throughout the community. In major portions of the older houses were reconstructed and running water and interior toilets installed in some. Docena Village was sold to John W.

Galbreath and Company in the When the mine closed in many people moved to find employment, but other purchased their homes and remained in the well-defined, isolated and attractive mining village. Sources Consulted White, Marjorie, The Birmingham District, pp. Rikard, Marlene Hunt, "Take Everything You Are...And Give It Away: Pioneer Industrial Social Workers at TCI," The Journal of the Birmingham Historical Society. Vol. 7, No. 2, pp.