Bessemer, The Marvel City's Steel and Struggle

Twelve miles southwest of Birmingham, the city of Bessemer was planned before it was built. In eighteen eighty-six, Henry DeBardeleben, one of the wealthiest iron industrialists in Alabama, purchased four thousand acres of Jefferson County farmland and announced that he would construct a complete industrial city from scratch. He named it for Henry Bessemer, the English inventor whose steel-making process had transformed industrial production around the world.

DeBardeleben's city was not a suburb. It was an intended rival to Birmingham, with its own pipe foundries, ore mining operations, steel plants, and railroad connections. Construction moved quickly; the city was incorporated in eighteen eighty-seven, only a year after DeBardeleben's land purchase. Within a decade, Bessemer's industrial output was impressive enough that boosters called it the Marvel City, a nickname that competed directly with Birmingham's own claim to magical growth.

The boom years of the early twentieth century filled Bessemer with blast furnaces, pipe plants, and a working-class population that was roughly divided between white and Black workers, though not equally paid or equally protected. The Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, which U.S. Steel absorbed in nineteen oh-seven, operated major facilities here. Republic Steel built pipe plants. Pullman-Standard manufactured railroad cars.

The deindustrialization that hit Birmingham after the nineteen sixties hit Bessemer harder in some respects, because Bessemer had less economic diversity to fall back on. The population, which had reached more than thirty-three thousand in nineteen seventy, fell steadily as plants closed.

Today Bessemer is a city of about twenty-six thousand, still working through the consequences of industrial departure. The Hall of History museum preserves the Marvel City's story, and several of the original industrial buildings remain standing, some repurposed, some waiting.