Bessemer: The City Built to Make Steel
Near Birmingham, Alabama
The city of Bessemer, just southwest of Birmingham, did not grow organically. It was designed from scratch to be a steel town, one of the most deliberate industrial experiments in the post-Civil War South.
In eighteen eighty-six, industrialist Henry Fairfield DeBardeleben bought four thousand acres of Jefferson County land and platted a new city on top of it. He named it after Sir Henry Bessemer, the British engineer whose converter process had revolutionized steel production, turning a slow, expensive craft into a fast industrial operation. DeBardeleben sold the first commercial lots in April of eighteen eighty-seven. By June of that same year, more than a thousand people had arrived. Within three years, Bessemer ranked fourth in Alabama by population. The city incorporated on September ninth, eighteen eighty-seven, less than a year after the first lots were staked.
DeBardeleben's operations were eventually absorbed into the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, TCI, which became the industrial colossus of the Birmingham district. Then, in nineteen oh seven, during a financial panic, J.P. Morgan's United States Steel Corporation bought TCI in a transaction President Theodore Roosevelt quietly approved, creating what was for a time the world's largest steelmaker under a single corporate roof.
That concentration of industrial power came with a dark underside. TCI and its successors relied heavily on Alabama's convict-lease system, in which the state rented prisoners, overwhelmingly young Black men, to companies for work in mines and furnaces. The practice continued in various forms until nineteen twenty-eight. Bessemer's blast furnaces, pipe shops, and rolling mills meanwhile produced railroad cars, structural steel, and chemicals that built much of the nation's infrastructure.
Today Bessemer is a quieter city, its industrial heyday long past, but its street grid still follows the geometric logic of a place purpose-built for production. It is a monument to the era when Alabama thought it could out-Pittsburgh Pittsburgh.
