The Alabama NAACP is searching for the descendants of coal miners who were killed or trapped for days in a 1901 disaster in a mine at Tuscaloosa's Bryce Hospital.

The nonprofit is working with the Alabama Historical Association and the city of Tuscaloosa to install a historical marker over the site of the mine shaft, all traces of which were obliterated to construct River Road, which is now known as Jack Warner Parkway.

This little-known mining disaster took three lives and led to a series of lawsuits in which the Black victims tried to hold the state of Alabama accountable with mixed results. That cause and effect was masterfully documented by researcher George Adair in the Alabama Review last year, and that piece informs most of the reporting below.

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Bryce Hospital Comes to Tuscaloosa

So why was there a coal mine on the site of Bryce Hospital for the mentally ill? Why was the state's first asylum built in Tuscaloosa to begin with?

The answer is almost 200 years old, dating back to 1846, when Montgomery was designated the new state capitol of Alabama. The city of Tuscaloosa had held that honor for 20 years, since 1826, and when the capitol moved, the local population and real estate prices began to plunge.

Six years later, when the state's General Assembly was debating where to build Alabama's first mental hospital, Adair said there were plenty of advocates for bringing Bryce to Tuscaloosa to offset the post-Capitol depression here.

Bryce Hospital opened in 1861, and by the turn of the century, it had grown into an economic engine with 1,500 patients, 200 employees, and massive tracts of land in the region.

Adair said the earliest therapies offered at Bryce were "work-centered," and patients at the hospital grew and manufactured a wide variety of goods there, from vegetables to household goods to coffins.

Selling the fruit of this inmate labor kept the asylum financially afloat when state funding dwindled, but their work required resources—resources like coal.

"Lucky" for them, though, Alabama's geography provided a perfect answer - the 'Asylum Seam,' which Adair said was a two-foot-thick band of coal buried beneath the bottom of Black Warrior River.

Mine shafts were dug at the banks of the river, plunging about 80 feet deep to get below the water and cutting inward to reach that critical coal buried under it. The Hospital mine was one of many developed in the late 1800s for that purpose, and in early 1901, there were 24 Black miners down there - employees of the Hospital, not patients there - when disaster struck.

Death and Darkness for Days

On February 20th, 1901, around 2 p.m., a wall of coal ruptured that separated the active mine from an abandoned, flooded one. Water began flooding into that space deep underground where the two dozen workers tried to scramble to safety.

11 men escaped, and their names are lost to time, at least to date. Three others - Jeff Hamner, Dock Foster and Pompey Stokes - drowned in the disaster.

10 remaining men spent two-and-a-half days in a nightmare, trapped down there in the flooded chambers for 63 hours. They stayed alive on an area of elevated earth where the water did not fully submerge. One newspaper account said they were on dry ground all along, while another said they spent some time standing in icy cold water.

Finally, days later, workers on the surface pumped out enough water for the survivors to wade, neck-deep, to the only ladder to the surface. Seven emerged unassisted, and three others had to be raised up in a cage, too weak for the 80-foot climb.

Eight of them are pictured below with four white hospital workers after they emerged from their would-be tomb 80 feet underground.

Adair identified the men as:

No. 5, Alonzo Smith, Underground Foreman
No. 6, James White
No. 7, John Stokes
No. 8, John Quinsy
No. 9, James Hays
No. 10, Peter Hodge
No. 11, Harry Slaughter
No. 12, Isom Ford

He said the other two survivors, identified as George Morris and William Hargrove, are not in the picture.

Court Battles with Mixed Results

The trio of lives lost in the disaster and the unthinkable anguish of those others who spent 60 hours underground in a flooded mine don't tell the full story, though. The tragedy also led to court battles to get justice for these Black workers in Jim Crowe Alabama.

To get a sense of the atmosphere of the era, the Alabama Constitution of 1901 was ratified later the same year. The president of the Convention where that happened, an Anniston man named John Knox, explicitly said they intended to place "the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be -– with the Anglo-Saxon race."

Still, the families of the three dead miners, Jeff Hamner, Dock Foster and Pompey Stokes, sued Bryce Hospital.

According to Adair, a court ordered the Hospital to pay Mary Hamner about $600, Rosa Stokes was paid $485 and Maggie Foster was paid $327 because she and Dock Foster were in the process of getting divorced when he drowned. Even that lowest amount, though, would exceed the average annual earnings of a Black woman at the time.

The survivors did not fare so well legally - four of them, James White, Alonzo Smith,
Isham Ford, and Peter Hodge, filed lawsuits seeking compensation for the time they spent entombed. Each man demanded $5,000.

Tuscaloosa County Court Judge James Jefferson Mayfield agreed with defense attorneys who argued that Bryce Hospital's status as a state-funded charitable institution shielded it from essentially any legal liability whatsoever. In November 1903, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed that decision.

For their horrors underground and the courage to sue the Hospital, the plaintiffs won only the responsibility to pay the state's legal fees.

Descendants Wanted!

123 years after the mining disaster, the NAACP and the Alabama Historical Association are working with the city of Tuscaloosa to install a historical marker and recognize these miners for their experiences both deep in the earth and inside Jim Crow courtrooms.

The sign will be installed on Jack Warner Parkway near the Park at Manderson Landing, which is believed to be built atop what was once the mine shaft to the Asylum Seam.

The institutions are looking for the descendants of these miners to include them in an unveiling ceremony for the new marker, which is scheduled for sometime in Spring 2025.

Again, the three men who died in the flooded mine are Jeff Hamner, Dock Foster and Pompey Stokes. The 11 survivors are Alonzo Smith, James White, John Stokes, John Quinsy, James Hays, Peter Hodge, Harry Slaughter, Isom Ford, George Morris and William Hargrove.

Anyone who believes they may be a descendant of one of these coal miners or who has additional information about the Bryce Hospital Mine and the disaster which led to its permanent closure is encouraged to contact the NAACP.

Tuscaloosa Chapter President Lisa Young can be reached at lmyoung.205@gmail.com. Patricia Evans with the state organization is comms@alnaacp.org.

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