Reconstruction
of the Alabama
Iron
Industry, 1865- 1880
By
ROBERT H. McKENZIE
Excerpts
This
complete article is from The Alabama
Review, A Quarterly Journal of Alabama History, July 1972 Vol. XXV, N0. 3,
pp 178 – 191.
The
article is an overview with opinions on why the southern interests looked to
the North during the reconstruction.
Although
the development of the iron industry in Alabama after the Civil War is usually
associated with Birmingham and the surrounding Jefferson County area, the true
pioneers of the state iron industry were not the coke furnaces of the
Birmingham red hematite district but the charcoal furnaces of the brown
hematite areas to the south and east of Birmingham. By the end of the Civil
War, seventeen Alabama blast furnaces had supplied iron to the Confederacy, and
only two of these were located in Jefferson County1
Most
of these seventeen furnaces were built as a result of the war. In 1861, Alabama
boasted only seven blast2 furnaces. None were in
Jefferson County. One was in Lamar County, and the others were in the belt of
counties south and east of Jefferson: Tuscaloosa, Bibb, Shelby, Calhoun, and
Cherokee. Statistics for the period prior to and including the Civil War are
unreliable, but the census of 1860 gives the capital invested in Alabama
furnaces in 1860 as $225,000, only
12 per cent of the total for the South and less than 1 per cent of the total
for the nation. Alabama's production of iron in 1860 amounted to only 1,742
tons, or 5 per cent of the South's total and 0.1 per cent of the nation's total3.
After the war began, however, ambitious industrial
entrepreneurs in Alabama hastened to meet the Confederacy's desperate need for
iron. By the end of the war, thirteen new furnaces had been constructed in the
state, all wholly or in part financed by the Confederacy. One of these furnaces
never went in blast. Three replaced existing stacks. Alabama in early 1865
therefore had sixteen furnaces in blast. As mentioned, only two were located in
Jefferson County. Three were in Tuscaloosa County, three in Bibb, one in
Shelby, two in Talladega, two in Calhoun, two in Cherokee, and one in Lamar.
The
Alabama furnaces were crucial to the Confederate war effort, although few of
them could produce more than ten tons per day and four to five tons was a more
likely daily output. As indicated previously, statistics for the war period are
questionable, but it can be argued that Alabama produced more iron for the
Confederacy than all other Confederate states combined4. The census
of 1860 indicates that Tennessee led the southern states in iron production in
1860 with 22,302 tons, followed by Virginia with 11,646 tons, Alabama with
1,742 tons, and Georgia with 1,100 tons.5 Tennessee and the iron
districts of what became West
Virginia were lost to the Confederacy early in the war. In addition, the status
of southern transportation kept iron from the remaining Virginia furnaces out
of the lower South. After June, 1863, all Alabama furnaces functioned under the
control of the Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau, and Alabama iron supplied
the Confederacy with much of its weaponry and ironclad armor.6
Realizing
the importance of the Alabama furnaces and the ordnance operations at Selma,
the Union command directed crippling strikes at the Alabama mineral district as
the war neared its end. In mid‑summer of 1864, small Union cavalry units
raided iron works in Calhoun and Cherokee counties. On March 22, 1865, General
James H. Wilson's Union cavalry corps departed North Alabama and moved toward
Selma. By the end of the first week in April, elements of Wilson's force had
taken Selma and had razed every furnace in Alabama not touched by previous
expeditions save one, that in Lamar County.7 The future of the
Alabama iron industry looked bleak.
Although
Southerners for many years after the war attributed their economic sufferings
to the havoc wrought by Federal troops, one should appraise the damage done to
the Alabama iron industry with caution. The Union forces' mission was to end
immediate productive capability. The raiders had neither the time nor the
energy to dismantle stone and brick furnaces. None of the Alabama furnaces were
torn down. The Federals did, however, destroy such essential equipment as blast
engines and boilers. They burned charcoal supplies on hand as furnace fuel and
wooden structures auxiliary to the furnaces. There is little evidence that
dwellings or other structures not directly related to iron production were
destroyed, nor were timber stands near the furnaces, essential for charcoal
production, put to the torch. Iron ore and pig iron, of course, could not be
burned, and these items were too bulky to be carried away from the works.
Furnace equipment that was rendered inoperative was already badly worn in many
cases. The experience of the Alabama iron industry suggests. that losing the
war was more central to the South's postwar problems than the destruction
caused by the war.
In fact, the greatest difficulty facing the Alabama iron men
at the conclusion of the war, lack of capital to pay debts and to finance
rebuilding, was a direct result of having lost the struggle. Since all the
Alabama furnace men had produced iron for the Confederacy, their largest bills
receivable were those owed by the Condederate government. The Confederacy's
downfall shut off this source of badly needed revenue, and the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which went into effect in the summer of
1868, eliminated any possibility that the debts could ever be recovered. On the
other hand, the furnace operators had gone into debt to private individuals
during the war for services and supplies in order to stay in operation. In many
cases, the furnace men had incurred these debts because the Confederacy had not
promptly made its payments for iron. Private debts in the South were not voided
by the Fourteenth Amendment, and the furnace operators were faced with paying
war debts without having reaped war profits.
A
second major difficulty hampering reconstruction of the Alabama furnaces was a
lack of experienced managers. The Alabama furnaces prior to the war were small
operations serving local markets. The wartime expansion of existing furnace
companies and the formation of new ones had enlarged the scale of the Alabama
iron trade, but throughout the war the state iron men had possessed a
guaranteed market, the Confederate States of America. With war's end, the
Alabama furnace operatives faced competitive factors on a scale theretofore
unknown to them. Most of the wartime furnace men were lawyers or merchants
interested in railroad and industrial development but without extensive
experience in the operation of furnaces and the marketing of iron products.
A third major difficulty confronting the Alabama iron men
was a lack of adequate and reliable transportation. In order to survive, the
furnace men needed markets larger than those of the prewar years. Southern
industry was limited and war‑torn. The state iron men needed markets
outside the South, and in order to reach non‑southern markets
competitively, they needed transportation facilities.
The obstacles facing the Alabama iron men were indeed
formidable. Six of the wartime furnaces were never again put in blast. These
were the three furnaces at Tannehill in Tuscaloosa County, one at Little Cahaba
in Bibb County, the Knight furnace in Talladega County, and the Cane Creek
furnace in Calhoun County. All these furnaces were small (approximately thirty
feet high), technologically inferior, and poorly situated in regard to
transportation facilities. It is doubtful that they could have survived in
circumstances other than the Confederacy's desperate need for iron, even if
they had not been raided by the Federals.
The
probable inability of these small furnaces to have long survived is illustrated
by the postwar history of the only Alabama furnace not raided by Federal
troops. The Hale and Murdock furnace (probably no more than thirty feet tall)
in Lamar County in West Alabama was off the beaten track of military campaigns.
It operated through the closing days of the war, but because of a limited local
market and a distance of twenty‑five miles from transportation
facilities, it went out of blast sometime between 1868 and 1870 and never
resumed operations.
Four of the wartime furnace sites did not again become iron
producers until 1873. These were Salt Creek in Talladega County, Round Mountain
in Cherokee County, oxford in Calhoun County, and Oxmoor in Jefferson County.
Of these, more will be said later.
The five remaining wartime furnaces‑Irondale in
Jefferson County, the two Brierfield furnaces in Bibb County, Cornwall in
Calhoun County, and Shelby in Shelby County‑were back in blast by 1869.
The first of the war‑damaged furnaces to resume
operations was Irondale in Jefferson County. The furnace (forty‑one feet
tall) had been built in 1863 and had been in blast only slightly more than a
year when Wilson's raiders ended its wartime involvement. The furnace's manager
immediately went north seeking capital, which he found in Cincinnati. The
investors from Ohio formed a new company with the wartime operators, increased
the height of the furnace to forty‑six feet, made other technological improvements,
and in late 1865 or early 1866 put the improved stack in blast for the
production of foundry iron. In spite of high transportation costs, the company
survived until the panic of 1873.
The
second war‑damaged furnace site to resume operations was Brierfield in
Bibb County. The two furnaces at Brierfield were actually owned by the
Confederacy during the war and were confiscated by the Federal government as
contraband after being raided by Wilson's troops.
A
group of Southerners, including Josiah Gorgas, former chief of Confederate
ordnance, purchased the plant at public sale in 1866. In early 1867, operations
were resumed, but the owners suffered from lack of capital, inexperienced
management, and poor transportation service by the Selma, Rome and Dalton
Railroad, which ran to the works. In 1869, Gorgas left the company, and the
works were leased by new operators. A furnace was kept in blast until 1873. The
plant was idle until 1877, when it was purchased by Louisville investors. In
1881, the firm again changed hands, and iron was produced at Brierfiel with
frequent interruptions until 1894.8
The third Alabama furnace to resume
production after being raided was Cornwall in Cherokee County. This furnace was
built during the war by the Noble brothers of Rome, Georgia. The Nobles were
prominent in the manufacture of iron products in Georgia, and later (in 1871)
they founded Anniston as an Alabama iron center. Immediately following the war,
the Nobles sought northern capital to revive Cornwall. The furnace was put back
in blast in 1867 with the capital of the four Noble brothers and three men from
Illinois. Apparently, friction soon developed between the Illinois capitalists
and the Noble brothers. A succession of investors joined with and then left the
Nobles, management was changed frequently, and the furnace was in and out of
blast with high operating costs until 1875 when it was blown out forever.
The fourth, and most successful, of the war‑damaged
furnaces to resume production was that of the Shelby Iron Company of Shelby
County.9 The postwar history of this
184 THE
ALABAMA REVIEW
company
illustrates the prerequisites necessary in Alabama for successful
reconstruction of a wartime furnace. Those wartime furnaces not having these
prerequisites did not resume operations. Those which did resume operations but
eventually failed possessed only a portion of the necessary components.
in the first place, the Shelby furnace was technologically
more advanced than most of its wartime contemporaries. The stack was built
during the war by Giles
Edwards, a native of Wales with long experience in the construction of
furnaces in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. The furnace was thirty‑eight feet
tall and was capable of producing twenty tons of iron per day. Consequently,
its cost of operation was probably the lowest of any of the wartime furnaces.
Secondly, the wartime owners of Shelby were able to acquire
capital sufficient to enable them to rebuild properly and to weather downswings
in the iron trade. The southern managers at first attempted to raise funds for
rebuilding by selling iron in the South, but they quickly saw that northern
capital would be required. At one point in the summer of 1866 the company had
six representatives in the North eagerly seeking investors, a reversal of the
legendary "carpetbagger" invasion one so often hears recounted. By
1868, the wartime owners had entered an investment agreement with a group of
Connecticut and New York capitalists for funds to rebuild the works. The
northerners thereby acquired fifty‑two per cent of the firm's capital
stock. Production was renewed in early 1869, and the northerners and
Southerners worked together effectively in the subsequent history of the
company.
Thirdly,
Shelby obtained superior managerial talent to guide its reconstruction. As a
condition of the investment agreement, the northerners furnished managers
experienced in the northern iron trade. These men were professionals, and their
leadership saved the company many an amateurish stumble.
Finally, Shelby's successful reconstruction was due to its
favored position in regard to transportation facilities. During the war, the
Shelby managers had, in the face of stiff resistance by the Confederate
government, built their own six‑mile rail line from the works to
Columbiana, where connection was made with the Tennessee and Alabama Rivers
Railroad, which ran from Selma to Blue Mountain (Anniston). After the war, the
Tennessee and Alabama Rivers Railroad was reorganized as a portion of the
Selma, Rome and Dalton. Shelby's wartime president, Samuel Tate, an influential
railroad man, secured a special freight contract with the railroad shortly
after the war. The special contract, a prime factor attracting the northern
investors*to Shelby, saved the company from the high freight costs so
detrimental to the recovery of other furnaces. The Selma, Rome and Dalton was
extended to Rome in 1868 and to Dalton in 1870, thus giving Shelby access to
markets in Atlanta and Chattanooga and the mid‑West. In late 1872, the
South and North Alabama Railroad was completed from Montgomery to Decatur,
where connection with the Nashville and Decatur gave access to the Louisville
and Nashville and markets along the Ohio River. The Louisville and Nashville
leased both the South and North Alabama and the Nashville and Decatur. Shelby's
access to the Louisville and Nashville system at Calera, eight miles west of
the works, provided the company with two competing railroad lines.
By
late 1870, a general contraction of the nation's economy, particularly severe
in the South, was causing Shelby's southern customers to fail to meet their
notes. Shelby's managers then sought other markets, and their access to
transportation routes enabled the company to develop a profitable market for
railroad car wheel iron in the mid‑West.
By late 1871, a burst of railroad expansion had revived the
iron business to such an extent that Shelby's managers, as well as other iron
men in Alabama and in the nation, laid plans for new furnaces. The business
optimism and the profitability of the iron trade quickly led to an increase in
furnace construction in the state not seen since the outbreak of the war.
Eight furnaces were built. Five of these were constructed on
the sites of Civil War period furnaces. Two of the five, in fact, were enlarged
and improved versions of furnaces which had stood at the end of the war. These
two were Round Mountain in Cherokee County and Oxmoor in Jefferson County. The
latter was the only one of the eight new furnaces not along the trackage of the
Selma, ,Rome and Dalton Railroad. The other three wartime furnace sites upon
which new furnaces were built were Salt Creek, renamed Alabama Furnace, in
Talladega County; Oxford, renamed Woodstock, in the newly founded town of
Anniston in Calhoun County; and a second furnace at Shelby.10
The three entirely new furnace properties were all in
Cherokee County near Rock Run. The smallest was called Rock Run, another was
named Stonewall, but the most successful was the Tecumseh furnace operated by
Willard Warner of Ohio, formerly one of Alabama's carpetbag senators. 11
Only
one (Rock Run) of the eight new furnaces was less than forty feet tall. Four
were only slightly larger, but three (Shelby, Woodstock, and Oxmoor) were sixty
feet tall, or almost twice as large as most of their wartime predecessors.
Seven of the eight new furnaces went in blast in late 1873
and early 1874. The eight new furnace (Shelby's second stack) went in blast in
1875. The bright prospects for the new furnaces were soon dimmed, as a
depression set in following the financial panic of September, 1873. The
depression of the 1870s ranks second in severity in United States history only
to the depression of the 1930s, and times for Alabama iron men in the mid‑1870s
were exceedingly difficult. Only Shelby, Woodstock, Tecumseh, and Alabama
Furnace stayed in continuous operation during the lean years from 1874 through
1877. Most of the other furnaces in the state were in blast infrequently.
Several changed owners. Cornwall in Cherokee County and Irondale in Jefferson County both went out
of blast forever.
The
failure of Irondale and the extreme difficulties encountered by the
inexperienced managers at Oxmoor made it seem doubtful in the mid‑1870s
that the iron business would survive in the new town of Birmingham, only
recently founded in December, 1871. Almost in desperation, Birmingham men
interested in the development of the iron industry, aided by Louisville and
Nashville officials interested in the freight a prosperous iron trade would bring,
banded together to form the Eureka Mining and Transportation Company to produce
iron with coke. Coke had been used as a fuel briefly at Irondale during the
war, and the Shelby company had experimented unsuccessfully with coke in the
early 1870s, but the success of the Eureka experiment in February, 1876, marks
the real beginning of the coke iron industry in Alabama. In spite of the
success of the experiment and the initiation of full-scale coke iron
production, the Eureka company suffered reverses during the remainder of the
1870s, and the dawn of the Birmingham iron boom was delayed yet awhile.
By 1877, the worse of the depression was over, although iron
prices remained very low until late 1879. Shelby, Woodstock, Tecumseh, and
Alabama Furnace were gradually joined in blast by other state furnaces. By late
1879, another iron boom was underway, and thirteen furnaces were in blast in
Alabama. Only one of these, a second furnace at Woodstock, was new, but the
prosperity of the iron trade was prompting plans for another burst of furnace
construction in the nation and in Alabama. In early 1880, Giles Edwards
heralded the Alabama furnace boom by putting a new furnace in blast in Bibb
County.
The
decade of the 1880s, however, was to belong to the Birmingham district. On
November 23, 1880, "Little Alice" roared into blast under the
guidance of T. T. Hillman and H. F. DeBardeleben, giant names in the annals of
Birmingham iron development. Giant stacks soon followed. "Little
Alice" and Pratt coal proved the practicality of making iron in Alabama
with coke, something the trouble‑plagued Oxmoor furnace had not been able
to do in spite of its valuable role as the first large‑scale coke iron
producer in the state. By 1884, six new furnaces, several towering seventy‑five
feet into the air, had inaugurated the Birmingham iron boom. By the end of the
decade, DeBardeleben‑the self‑proclaimed eagle‑had soared
mightily over Jefferson County; James W. Sloss, Enoch Ensley, and others had
with DeBardeleben organized furnace ventures capitalized in the millions of
dollars; the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had sprawled into Birmingham from
the mountains of East Tennessee; and eighteen furnaces were in blast in and
near Birmingham. Alabama iron production increased almost twelve‑fold
between 1880 and 1890, and Alabama red iron ore and coal resources became
topics of national prominence.
The trail had been blazed for the Birmingham district,
however, by the men who had persevered to resurrect the wartime furnaces. Of
the sixteen furnaces standing in 1865, eight operated after the war. Two other
wartime iron properties‑Salt Creek and Oxford‑were sites for new
furnaces by 1880. Of the sixteen wartime furnaces only Shelby, Oxmoor, and
Brierfield still operated in 1880. Only Shelby had been in continuous operation
since resuming production after the war.
These surviving
wartime furnaces kept the Alabama iron industry viable in the postwar years. By
staying in blast and by developing markets in the South and in the midWest,
these furnaces provided examples for the new furnaces which went in blast in
1873 and 1874. In 1880, Alabama pig iron production amounted to 77,190 tons,
which ranked eighth in the United States compared to, fourteenth in 1860 and
sixteenth in 1870. 12 By 1880, Shelby car
wheel iron was one of the three leading brands of car wheel iron in the nation
with customers as far away as Kansas City, Missouri, and Toronto, Canada.
Woodstock and Alabama Furnace also sold car wheel iron regularly in the mid‑West,
and Woodstock was widely known as one of the few producers in the nation of
speigeleisen, used in the Bessemer steel process. When the opportunity came in
the 1880s to develop the Birmingham ore fields, many of which had been
purchased by northern investors in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the fifteen
years of proven capability provided by such wartime furnaces as Shelby and its
contemporaries were important items in giving confidence to the Birmingham iron
boom.
1.
Joseph H. Woodward, II, "Alabama Iron Manufacturing, 1860‑1865,"Alabama
Review, VII July, 1954), 203. Woodward's article is based primarily on
Woodward's Alabama Blast Furnaces (Woodward, Ala.: Woodward Iron Co., 1940).
Furnace statistics herein are taken from Woodward's works and from Ethel Armes,
The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham: Published under the Auspices
of the Chamber of Commerce, 1910).
2. U. S. Bureau of the Census,
Manufactures of the United States in 1860; Compiledfrom the Original Returns of
the Eighth Census, clxxx, gives the number of Alabama furnaces 'as four.
Actually, seven furnaces are known to have been built in the state prior to
1860. One (Alabama's first furnace, Cedar Creek, blown in near Russellville in
1815) was definitely not in blast in 1860, but how many of the others were
actually in operation in 1860 cannot be determined.
3.
U. S. Bureau of the Census, Manufactures of the United States in 1860; Compiled
from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, clxxx.
4.
See Woodward, "Alabama Iron Manufacturing, 1860‑1865," 207.
Woodward gives no statistical evidence for his assertion.
5.
U. S. Bureau of the Census, Manufactures of the United States in 1860; Compiled
from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, clxxx.
6. See Charles B. Dew, Ironmaker to the
Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1966); William N. Still, Jr., Confederate Shipbuilding
(Athens: University of Georgia Press); William N. Still, Jr., Iron Afloat: The
Story of the Confederate Armor-clads (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press,
1970); and Frank E. Vandiver, Ploughshares into Swords, Josiah Gorgas and
Confederate Ordnance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952).
7.
See Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record (I I vols.; New York: D. Van
Nostrand, 1868), XI, 649‑717, and Charles R. Watkins, "General
Wilson's Raid Through Alabama and Georgia in 1865" (Unpublished M.A.
thesis, Auburn University, 1959).
8. See Frank E.
Vandiver, "Josiah Gorgas and the Brierfield Iron Works," Alabama
Review, III (January, 1950), 6‑21; Brierfield Iron Works Collection,
University of Alabama Library, Tuscaloosa; and Josiah Gorgas Papers, Alabama
State Department of Archives and History, Montgomery.
9. See Robert H. McKenzie, "A History
of the Shelby Iron Company, 1865‑1881" (Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Alabama, 1971).
10. On Woodstock, see
Samuel N, McCaa, "Samuel Noble: Founder of Anniston" (Unpublished
M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 1966) and Samuel Noble Family Records, Anniston
Public Library.
11. See Willard Warner
Collection (microfilm copies of originals in the Tennessee State Archives,
Nashville), University of Alabama Library, Tuscaloosa.
12. U. S. Bureau of
the Census, Manufactures of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the
Original Returns of the Eighth Census, clxxx; Ninth Census of the United
States: 1870, The Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States,
602‑603; and Report of the Manufactures of the United States at the Tenth
Census, 10‑ 11.