Fairfield: The City US Steel Built from Scratch
Near Birmingham, Alabama
In nineteen ten, United States Steel Corporation did not simply open a plant southwest of Birmingham. It built an entire city. After U.S. Steel acquired the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in nineteen oh seven, it hired Birmingham developer Robert Jemison Jr. and a Boston landscape designer to lay out a community from scratch, with wide tree-lined streets, parks, and nearly thirty thousand planted trees and shrubs.
The town was first called Corey, after U.S. Steel's president, but company officials renamed it Fairfield in nineteen thirteen after the Connecticut hometown of another executive. Modern housing with indoor plumbing and central heat was available to workers for rent or purchase. By World War Two, the Fairfield Works employed more than forty-five thousand people, making it one of the largest steel-producing complexes in the American South. Incorporated on January first, nineteen nineteen, Fairfield stands today as a textbook example of the company town, built entirely to serve the needs of an industrial giant.
