in Barbour County. An important source of wealth for John Comer, B. B. Comer's brother, was the development of the Eureka Mines. Avondale Mills Another of Comer's enterprises was Avondale Mills, which, with his sons' help, became one of the largest textile companies in Alabama. The Trainer family, who had a textile business in Chester, Pennsylvania, planned to expand its business into the South through the new and growing industrial city of Birmingham. It offered stock to business leaders, such as Frederick Mitchell Jackson Sr., who agreed to commit $150,000 to bring the mills to Birmingham. Jackson, president of Birmingham's Commercial Club, a forerunner of the Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce, pledged "to help give employment to those badly in need of it in the young and struggling city of Birmingham." B. B. Comer's son, James McDonald Comer, later recalled that his father was motivated to participate in the new business by "feeling that Birmingham needed an industry which could employ women as well as men." Accepting the businessman's pledges of financial participation, the Trainers sought a local investor to assume the presidency of the mill. In 1897, they approached Braxton Bragg Comer. The future governor accepted the offer and invested $10,000 into the enterprise. From 1897 until 1927, he served as president of Avondale Mills, directing continued expansion to new sites. In 1897 Comer built the first mill in Avondale, an area that would become part of Birmingham. During the first year of its operation, Avondale Mills used 4,000 bales of cotton. By 1898, Avondale Mills employed 436 laborers and generated $15,000 in profit. By the time B. B. Comer became governor of Alabama in 1907, Avondale Mills had declared $55,000 in profit and produced almost 8,000,000 yards of material. By the turn of the century, Avondale Mills had set the course for future development. Avondale Mills began with 30,000 spindles in the first mill in Birmingham and grew over the next thirty years to include ten mills in seven communities, totaling 282,160 spindles. The mills [included]: Eva Jane, the Central, the Sally B, and the Catherine in Sylacauga; the Alexander City Cotton Mills, the Sycamore Mills, Mignon, and Bevelle Mill, and the Pell City Manufacturing Company. As cotton prices fell, poor white farmers lost their land and turned to sharecrop and tenancy; some were willing to give up farming and move to mill towns. One white mill worker