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| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| WinstonCountyGrad |
Posted - 01/18/2010 : 19:44:36
1932
9/23 6-0 @ Meek
9/30 0-6 @ Lynn
10/7 19-0 Phil Campbell
10/14 9-0 @ Addison
Rest of the season cancelled when school closed for a month
1934
9/21 0-0 @ Meek
10/5 12-0 Holly Pond
10/12 13-0 Curry
10/19 14-0 Haleyville
10/26 13-0 Lawrence County
11/2 14-0 @Bear Creek
11/9 6-14 @Lynn
11/16 0-6 Blountsville
11/23 6-0 Addison
1935 (partial schedule, all home)Home games played at Weaver Bowl on campus
9/20 Meek
10/4 0-0 Oakman
11/1 0-2 Lynn
1936
0-0 Meek
9/25 W Boaz
10/2 7-0 Piper
10/9 6-12 @Oakman
10/23 0-7 Bankhead
10/30 L @Lynn
11/6 W Brilliant
11/13 W Hayden
11/25 7-7 @Addison
1937
9/24 12-0 Meek
10/1 24-0 Phil Campbell
10/8 13-7 Oakman
10/15 6-0 @Town Creek
10/22 0-0 @Bankhead
10/29 12-0 Curry
11/5 7-20 Dora
11/12 7-0 Lynn
1938
9/23 14-0 @Meek
9/30 0-6 @Phil Campbell
10/7 7-21 @Parrish
10/14 Town Creek
10/28 Addison
11/11 @Athens
11/18 @Lynn
11/23 L Haleyville
1939
9/29 6-0 Meek
10/6 0-25 @Lawrence County
10/20 14-6 Vina
10/27 6-6 Phil Campbell
11/3 0-2 Bear Creek
11/10 20-14 Addison
11/17 6-0 Lynn
11/23 0-19 @Haleyville
Also 1927 additions:
10/5 Eldridge
11/16 0-6 @Haleyville
___________________________________________
Proud native of the "Free State of Winston" |
| 8 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| svmounties |
Posted - 01/25/2010 : 15:46:14
David, the article you posted noted that Piper's nickname was the Bulldogs.
________________________________________________________________________
Shane Paschal
Shades Valley High School
Class of 1986
Go Mounties ! |
| WinstonCountyGrad |
Posted - 01/21/2010 : 15:39:07
Nice. That is one of the things I love about doing research, finding those nuggets of history that we can document.
___________________________________________
Proud native of the "Free State of Winston" |
| dparker |
Posted - 01/21/2010 : 08:33:00
I was searching around the other day and came across this article about Piper Colearnor. I was not looking for them but found it by accident. It was written by Bill Plott in the Tuscaloosa News on 10/7/1971. I have added them as a team and they will appear on the next update I do probably tomorrow.
I don't add teams when we only have a couple of scores because it is a lot of work and in the past I have added teams only to find out later they were the same as another school, they were in Mississippi or something else that makes me have to delete them later. So, now I wait until I find out something for certain on a team before adding them. We still have several other schools like this one where we have a couple of scores but not enough to know anyhting about them.
Here is a link to the article.
http://www.ahsfhs.org/articles/piper%20coleanor.pdf
David Parker
Administrator
AHSFHS.org |
| svmounties |
Posted - 01/20/2010 : 02:06:46
I did a search for 'Piper' on the site and found games for them from '35 with Marion County and Northport. I also remember seeing just a 'Piper' listed as an opponent for others before. Who knows, the team might have only been around for 2 years or so, and that might be why there's so few mentions so far. That school is long gone, and even the field they played on probably disappeared in the woods as they mentioned. I wonder if their mascot was the 'Miners'.
________________________________________________________________________
Shane Paschal
Shades Valley High School
Class of 1986
Go Mounties ! |
| WinstonCountyGrad |
Posted - 01/19/2010 : 15:38:19
I remember that article now from when you posted it earlier. Interesting reading. It seems we would find more and more scores for the school as we fill in later years.
___________________________________________
Proud native of the "Free State of Winston" |
| svmounties |
Posted - 01/19/2010 : 14:59:03
Yeah, there was an article in the Birmingham News in April of 2008 about forgotton cemeteries in the area. They mentioned old mining towns of Piper and Colenor in Bibb County, and that they shared a high school called Piper Coleanor High School, which it stated won several county championships. I posted a message here about the article when it appeared. There's only been one other mention of Piper in scores on the site up till now. Here's the article I searched for on the Birmingham News archive site. The article is by Bill Plott, who David knows, so if he wanted to add the school to the site Bill might know more about it to add information not currently known. Since you have to have a Jefferson County library subscription to read the whole article, I added the article below.
Bibb County woods hide remnants of 2 lost towns
April 11, 2008
Section: LOCAL NEWS
Page: 1-C
BILL PLOTT News staff writer
WEST BLOCTON
Jerry Fondren was hunting turkeys near here a few years ago. Instead of toms, he found a cemetery and the remains of a town that was once home to as many as 3,000 people.
In the woods a few hundred feet off Bibb County Road 24 are the remnants of Piper, a mining town with a company store, offices, a school, churches and as many as 500 houses, according to the late Jefferson County historian James Walker.
Small frame houses once dotted the hillsides and valleys of an area filled with similar towns, places such as Coleanor, Belle Ellen and Hargrove.
Today there is no trace of Piper except a small stone building and several burial sites overgrown and largely invisible most of the year. The two larger cemeteries, one for blacks and the other for whites, were rediscovered a few years ago by Fondren, a West Blocton waterworks employee. They are near the Cahaba Wildlife Refuge along the Cahaba River.
''We were out turkey hunting and we just walked up the middle of it. I didn't think anything more about it until my cousin Paula (Fancher) got interested in cemeteries,'' he said. ''We counted them (grave sites) as best we could and found about 125 graves. We know we didn't find them all. Kimberly-Clark owned the land at the time. You could get a permit for hunting.''
The cemetery, near a small stream a hundred or more yards off the road, is almost certainly filled with the remains of blacks who lived in the area, many of them coal miners.
Most of the graves are recognized by slight depressions in the earth. Only a handful of tombstones remain. One of them, a 1920 marker for S.J. Dosson, points to the likely racial identity. The inscription says he was a member of the Mosaic Templars of America, which was a black fraternal organization founded in Little Rock in 1883.
''There are cemeteries all over that area of Alabama, completely forgotten about,'' said Lee Anne Wofford of the Alabama Historical Commission's Architectural Survey and Cemetery Program.
Fondren, who was West Blocton fire chief for 21 years, stumbled across another burial site on the north side of Highway 24 while fighting woods fires. One lone tombstone marked the grave of January Bonner, a black World War I veteran,who served with the Alabama 549th Engineers. He died March 1, 1950, according to the inscription.
''When I first saw it, I thought some kids had stolen it and thrown it out in the woods because it was there by itself. Then I could see from the depressions around it there were four or five more graves there,'' Fondren said.
Using directions from another hunter, he found what appears to be a white Piper cemetery. It, too, is on the north side of the road. Both sites are on private land and can be found only during the winter. Fondren said spring growth again is obscuring both sites.
The white cemetery appears to contain only about a dozen graves, lending credence to reports that there is yet another white burial ground lost in the woods. That cemetery is reported to have tombstones with Italian inscriptions - some of them have photographs of the deceased embedded in the stone. Another burial ground, with similar tombstones, is in West Blocton. It is known as the ItalianCatholic Cemetery.
Jim Parker, a former pastor in the area who now lives in Louisiana, recalls seeing another white cemetery in the woods near Piper in late 1970s. He said it was off an old logging road. He said he tried without success to find it again about two years ago.
''I only went a short distance and did not see the cemetery,'' he wrote in an email. ''As you might imagine, the area has grown up considerably in the last 20 years. You can see this old roadbed in Google Earth. My suspicion is that there was probably one of the Marvel churches nearby. The footbridge that spanned the deep hollow over to Coleanor would have been just to the east of this location, probably less than half a mile away.''
The footbridge mentioned by Parker connected the mining towns of Piper, built by the Little Cahaba Mining Co., and Coleanor, built by the Blocton-Cahaba Coal Co. In the 1930s they shared school facilities, and Piper-Coleanor High School was big enough to field football teams and won a few county championships over neighboring West Blocton and Bibb County High School at Centreville.
Towns disappear
When the mines played out in the late 1940s and early 1950s the towns were dismantled. Mining towns like Piper and Coleanor typically were owned by the mining company. Once the mine shut down and the workers were gone, the company took apart the workers' houses, board by board, sold the lumber or carried it off to another mining site to build another town.Walker, the late historian, wrote that frame houses in Piper were sold to private individuals and concerns for $100 a room.
Today, nothing remains of Coleanor. The only surviving building from Little Cahaba Mining Co. and the town of Piper is a stone structure with metal doors referred to locally as the vault. It was the company's payroll office.
The front door, removed by vandals or weather, lies in thick underbrush. Through the doorway the massive steel safe, rusting on casters, is still visible.
Former residents of Piper and Coleanor keep in touch. In 1953 the idea for a reunion was born in a Midfield barber shop and held at the home of Midfield resident Floyd Chism. Survivors and descendants have since gathered every summer.
''Last year they had 57 people,'' said Paula Fancher. ''My father was from Piper and my mother was from West Blocton.''
Advice, no money
Fancher said many are concerned about the lost cemeteries and what can be done to preserve them. There are no easy answers, especially since the cemeteries are usually on private property.
''There is no law that says a property owner must maintain an old cemetery,'' said Wofford. ''Nobody can go in there and willfully destroy it, but they are not required to maintain it.''
Sometimes, the property has been acquired by large corporations through a succession of transactions and the current owner is not even aware of the cemeteries until they are discovered by someone like Fondren. That may lead eventually to contact with the Alabama Historical Commission or some other historical preservation agency.
''We can only give advice about preservation. We don't have any financial resources to offer,'' said Wofford. ''We work all the time with people who want to reclaim these lost, neglected cemeteries, lost to vegetation. We come out and look and try to help them find ways to control the vegetation.''
The old Piper property has gone through a number of hands over the years. It is now believed to belong to Forest Investments Associates in Atlanta, which acquired it from the Hancock Timber Resource Group of the John Hancock Insurance Co. Efforts to contact the Atlanta firm were unsuccessful.
Cemetery access
Wofford said legislation passed last year, but not yet tested in the field, may offer some help in the future.
''There is a new cemetery access law. It gives people the right to visit cemeteries on private land,'' she said.
Fancher noted that Piper cemeteries are on property leased to hunting clubs much of the winter. In the summer, the sites are not only overgrown with new vegetation but also inhabited by rattlesnakes.
EMAIL: bplott@bhamnews.com
________________________________________________________________________
Shane Paschal
Shades Valley High School
Class of 1986
Go Mounties ! |
| WinstonCountyGrad |
Posted - 01/19/2010 : 08:40:14
I wondered about that since I couldn't find them on the site anywhere.
___________________________________________
Proud native of the "Free State of Winston" |
| svmounties |
Posted - 01/19/2010 : 00:48:40
The 'Piper' in the 1936 schedule must be the Piper Colenear High School I saw an article about in the Birmingham News about a year or two ago. They have no team page as of yet, and I've only seen a couple other scores for that school, but apparently they were very good back then and won several county titles.
________________________________________________________________________
Shane Paschal
Shades Valley High School
Class of 1986
Go Mounties ! |
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