Samuel Noble and the Model City

The man this monument honors essentially willed this city into being. Samuel Noble was an English born ironmaster who, in eighteen seventy-two, partnered with a former Union general named Daniel Tyler to form the Woodstock Iron Company right here. By the summer of eighteen seventy-three their furnace was pouring well over a hundred tons of pig iron a week, and a town grew up around it. They named it Anniston, after the wife of the general's son, Annie.

But Noble wanted more than a factory town. He set out to build a planned city that Atlanta editor Henry Grady later dubbed the Model City of the South. The company laid out tree lined streets, built worker cottages with gardens, ran a farm for food, and put up churches and schools. For years it stayed a closed company town. Noble died in eighteen eighty-eight, but the iron city he imagined had already taken root.