B. B. Comer - Eureka Mines

Eureka Mines

An important source of Comer family wealth was the development of the Eureka Mines in Shelby County south of Birmingham. The manager of the labor force was J.W. Comer, the brother of Governor B. B. Comer. The Eureka complex consisted of two mines, one worked by free miners, and the other by convicts leased under the convict labor system. The vast majority of convict laborers were African Americans, who were convicted in the justice system at a rate of four times that of white citizens. The Comer mines were developed by "primitive excavation techniques and relentless, atavistic physical force."

Ezekial Archey, a prisoner leased to Eureka mine, wrote that the convicts lived in a stockade "filled with filth and vermin. Gunpowder cans were used to hold human waste that would fill up and 'run all over our beds where prisoners were shackled hand and foot for the night'." Later he wrote to a Roosevelt Administration investigator that

"Comer {the Governor’s brother and manager of the mine} is a hard man. I have seen men come to him with their shirts a solid scab on their backs and he would let the hide grow on and take it off again. I have seen him hit men 100 to 160 times with a ten prong strop and then say thay was not whipped. He would go off after an escaped man come one day with him and dig his grave the same day."

Between 1878 and 1880, twenty-five bonded convicts died whose contracts had been sold to the Comer-backed Eureka mines. Their bodies were dumped into shallow earthen pits on the edge of the mine site.

Jonathan Good testified to the Joint Commission created by the Roosevelt administration to investigate the use of peonage in Alabaman enterprises. He said that J.W. Comer, manager of the Eureka mines and brother of the governor,

" ordered a captured black escapee to lie on the ground and the dogs were biting him. He begged piteously to have the dogs taken off of him, but Comer refused to allow it. Comer...stripped him naked took a stirrup strap, doubled it, wet it, bucked him and whipped him, unmercifully whipped him, over half and hour. The Negro begged them to take a gun and kill him. They left him in a Negro cabin where... he died within a few hours."