Blocton Italian Catholic Cemetery
cemetery in West Blocton, Alabama
The Blocton Italian Catholic Cemetery is a historic cemetery on Primitive Ridge Road in West Blocton, Alabama, United States. It was established in 1896 by Italian Catholic immigrant workers employed in the coal mines of Bibb County. The cemetery occupies less than one acre in what was originally Blocton, a coal-mining company town built by the Cahaba Coal Mining Company in 1883 and acquired by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in 1892. It was consecrated in 1901 by Edward Patrick Allen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Mobile, and remained in use until the 1960s, with the greatest number of burials recorded during the 1910s and 1920s. The cemetery contains approximately 86 funerary monuments. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 22, 1999, for its significance in ethnic European heritage.
History
The Cahaba Coal Mining Company, incorporated in 1883 by Truman H. Aldrich, established Blocton as a company town for its northern Bibb County coal operations. Immigrant workers drawn from Italy, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria staffed the mines. The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company acquired the Cahaba operations in 1892.
The Italian Catholic community at Blocton established the cemetery in 1896.
The public source identifies “Blocton Italian Catholic Cemetery” as cemetery in West Blocton, Alabama. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Blocton, Italian and Catholic.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14678991. Authority coordinates are 33.113, -87.114. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1896, 1883, 1892 and 1901.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blocton Italian Catholic Cemetery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.