Wood township

Robertsdale Strikes 1922 And 1927

Looking north along Main Street in Robertsdale, with the East Broad Top depot at left and the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company office and post office at rightHistoric American Buildings Survey (Town of Robertsdale), Library of Congress. Public domain. HABS, Town of Robertsdale

Robertsdale was a Rockhill Iron and Coal Company town. The company established it in 1873 to house its employees and their families, and it kept control of the village until the mines closed and its holdings were divested in 1956.

According to old-timers who worked for the company, Rockhill treated its workers much the same as any other coal company. Strikes were a regular occurrence, mostly coinciding with state and national protests over higher wages, shorter hours and higher mine safety standards, and newspapers indicate strikes in the Broad Top coal fields as early as the 1880s. The biggest strikes came in 1922 and 1927, and lasted for months.

The miners at Robertsdale had formed Local No. 1031 of the United Mine Workers early in the twentieth century, and around 1920 they were permitted to put up a union hall behind the hotel. During strikes, coal companies hired private police, the Coal and Iron Police, authorized by the state legislature. The federal survey of the town says they gave the coal companies unlimited power, which was often used to evict striking miners from their homes, and tax records indicate the Rockhill company employed five of them in 1930.

Because the company provided their housing, striking miners risked losing their homes as well as their jobs. During the 1927 strike, the union built a barracks on Lincoln Street, just outside the village, to house the evicted miners.

Checked and confirmed. CONFIRMED 2026-10-30 against the sources listed: every factual sentence was tied to a verbatim passage and a script confirmed each passage is in its source. Where sources disagreed on a number, the number was left out.

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