Sloss Furnaces, Nearly a Century of Fire

Stand in front of the Sloss Furnaces today and the scale is hard to process. Thirty-two acres of pipes, vats, stacks, and catwalks, all of it made of iron, all of it silent. In nineteen eighty-one it became a National Historic Landmark. But for nearly a hundred years before that, it was something else entirely: one of the loudest, hottest, most dangerous industrial complexes in the South.

James Withers Sloss was an Alabama railroad man who understood the geography of the valley. In eighteen eighty-one, he founded the Sloss Furnace Company beside the same rail crossing that had called the city into existence. Construction moved quickly. By eighteen eighty-two, the furnaces were making pig iron.

By eighteen ninety, Alabama had become the fourth-largest pig-iron-producing state in the country, and Sloss was a central reason why. The furnaces ran continuously. Shifts of workers fed them ore from Red Mountain, coke from the coalfields, and limestone from the valley floor. The iron they poured was shipped north and used in foundries across the country.

What the furnaces consumed in raw material they also consumed in men. The work was brutal in any era. In Sloss's early decades, much of the labor was performed by convict leasees, Black men arrested under broad vagrancy laws and leased by the state to industrial companies at a few dollars per month. Their working and living conditions were documented by state inspectors who largely looked away.

The company changed hands several times, eventually becoming a subsidiary of U.S. Pipe and Foundry Company. It ran until nineteen seventy-one, when aging infrastructure and foreign competition made the furnaces uneconomical. Birmingham voters approved a bond measure to preserve the site rather than demolish it, and in nineteen eighty-one the landmark designation followed. The pipes are cold now, but the structure they leave behind is one of the most intact industrial complexes remaining anywhere in the United States.