Tannehill Ironworks, Furnaces in the Forest

About thirty-five miles southwest of Birmingham, tucked into the Roupes Valley along Roupes Creek, stand the ruins of three iron furnaces that once supplied iron to the Confederate military. The site is called Tannehill, named for Ninion Tannehill, an early owner. The first forge here was built by Daniel Hillman in eighteen thirty.

The land was ideal for small-scale iron production: ore outcroppings nearby, charcoal from the surrounding forest, and water to power the bellows. The original forge was modest, producing iron for local farmers and blacksmiths. Ownership passed through several hands across the antebellum decades, and by the time the Civil War began, the operation had expanded substantially.

During the war, the Confederate government recognized Tannehill as a critical strategic resource. The three blast furnaces operating by eighteen sixty-three were producing iron at rates that supplied wagon parts, artillery equipment, and tools across the western Confederate states. At peak operation, Tannehill employed hundreds of workers, including enslaved men who performed much of the heaviest labor.

On March thirty-first, eighteen sixty-five, a Union cavalry column under General James Wilson swept through the valley as part of Wilson's Raid, a broad campaign to destroy Confederate industrial capacity in Alabama. The soldiers demolished the furnaces systematically, tore out the machinery, burned the casting sheds, and freed the enslaved workers on the premises. The ironworks never operated again.

The ruins sat in the forest for more than a century. In nineteen sixty-nine, the state of Alabama established Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park around the site, and the park now includes a reconstructed village of historic cabins, the furnace ruins themselves, and the Iron and Steel Museum of Alabama, which traces the full arc of ironmaking in the state from the colonial period through the twentieth century.