The superintendent's house on Church Street

The Historic American Buildings Survey's file on the superintendent's house at 9 Church Street in Robertsdale holds photographs behind a single cover sheet, with no written history of its own. What the record says about the house comes from the National Register nomination for the Robertsdale Historic District and from the survey's overview report on the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company towns.

The nomination lists 9 Church Street as a single house built about 1896 for mine supervisors, and names it as one of three exceptions to the usual miners' housing, along with the one-story cottages on Spring Street and the Methodist parsonage on Lincoln Street. It sits just below the Methodist church at the end of Church Street and near the portal of Rockhill mine No. 1. It is a balloon-frame, two-story, side-gabled house of the same size and massing as the semi-detached miners' houses, with one added detail: a porch with turned posts, which the nomination found on two other houses in town, the postmaster's and the engineer's. The survey's overview report names the paymaster's house as another with turned porch posts.

The overview report says that by 1921 the community had five working collieries, two superintendents' houses, a doctor's house, a paymaster's house, a train depot, an engine house, four churches, and more than 200 double and fifty single miners' dwellings. The church up the hill from the superintendent's house stands on land the nomination says the company gave to the Methodists in 1890, and the company kept the right to mine the coal beneath it.

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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