Cottondale is an unincorporated community in Tuscaloosa County

Tuscaloosa County, Alabama

Tuscaloosa County is a county of the U.S. state of Alabama.It is named in honor of the pre-Choctaw chief Tuskaloosa. In 2010, the population was 194,656...

, Alabama

Alabama

Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...

, now encompassed in the eastern suburbs of Tuscaloosa

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Tuscaloosa is a city in and the seat of Tuscaloosa County in west central Alabama . Located on the Black Warrior River, it is the fifth-largest city in Alabama, with a population of 90,468 in 2010...

. The ZIP Code

ZIP Code

ZIP codes are a system of postal codes used by the United States Postal Service since 1963. The term ZIP, an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan, is properly written in capital letters and was chosen to suggest that the mail travels more efficiently, and therefore more quickly, when senders use the...

 is 35453. Alternative spellings include Cotton Dale, Kennedale, Kennidale and Konnidale.

Cottondale was the site of cotton mill

Cotton mill

A cotton mill is a factory that houses spinning and weaving machinery. Typically built between 1775 and 1930, mills spun cotton which was an important product during the Industrial Revolution....

s where the Knights of Labor

Knights of Labor

The Knights of Labor was the largest and one of the most important American labor organizations of the 1880s. Its most important leader was Terence Powderly...

 had some success in organizing drives in the late 1880s; and where "Mother" Jones worked in 1904 while studying conditions for working women and children in the South.

"Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the endless rows of spindles, reaching thin little hands into the machinery to repair snapped threads.... Tiny babies of six years old with faces of sixty did an eight-hour shift for ten cents a day.... The machines, built in the north, were built low for the hands of little children.

Children's author Aileen Kilgore Henderson lives in Cottondale.