Birmingham, Alabama: The City That Had Everything Underground

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Editor’s Note – Jim Rhodes now of Coulterville, along with his new partner Glynn Wilson, both have roots in Birmingham, Alabama before moving to California. This recent story and documentary video tells some of the little known and early history of the place.

Historic Photos of Birmingham in the 50s, 60s, and 70s

By Paul McAllister –

Birmingham was supposed to be the steel capital of the world. Founded in 1871 at the crossing of two railroads, it sat on the only place on Earth where iron ore, coal, and limestone — the three raw materials needed to make steel — existed close enough together that you could walk between them.

Within a decade, blast furnaces lined the valley. Pig iron costs ran five to eight dollars a ton cheaper than anything Pittsburgh could produce. The population grew seven hundred percent in ten years.

Skyscrapers went up four at a time on a single corner. A sixty-ton iron statue of Vulcan won the Grand Prize at the 1904 World’s Fair. The Tutwiler Hotel opened to eight thousand guests in formal attire. They called it the Magic City, and for a while, it was.

Then J.P. Morgan bought it.

In November 1907, during a Wall Street financial panic, Morgan’s U.S. Steel Corporation acquired the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company — Birmingham’s largest employer, one of the original twelve companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average — for roughly thirty million dollars.

Executives later estimated the mineral reserves alone were worth a hundred million. What followed was a pricing policy called Pittsburgh Plus, designed to ensure Birmingham’s cheap steel could never undercut Pittsburgh’s mills. The geological advantage that justified the city’s existence was erased on a corporate ledger seven hundred miles away.

This is the story of what that did to a city — through world wars and civil rights, through grand hotels demolished for bank buildings, through furnaces that went dark after ninety years, and through the unlikely rise of a university medical center that now employs more people than U.S. Steel ever did in Alabama. It is a story about iron, money, and who owns the ground beneath your feet.

Sources

W. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An Industrial Epic (University of Alabama Press, 1994)
Encyclopedia of Alabama — entries on Birmingham Iron and Steel Companies, Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, and the Convict-Lease System (encyclopediaofalabama.org)
Bhamwiki — entries on U.S. Steel, the Heaviest Corner on Earth, Historical Demographics of Birmingham, and the Tutwiler Hotel (bhamwiki.com)
Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, 1910)
Vulcan Park & Museum historical archives and timeline (visitvulcan.com)
Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections — historical photographs, maps, the 1873 cholera report by Dr. Mortimer Jordan, and the Jemison Magazine archives

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