Tannehill Ironworks: Where the Confederacy Forged Its Iron

Deep in the woods of Roupes Valley, about thirty miles southwest of Birmingham, three massive stone furnaces once glowed around the clock, feeding the Confederate war machine with pig iron. Today the ruins of those furnaces are among the best-preserved industrial relics of the Civil War era in the American South.

The site's iron-making history began in eighteen thirty as a small, single-furnace operation. It remained modest until the Civil War transformed it into something far larger. In eighteen fifty-nine, noted southern ironmaster Moses Stroup began construction of Furnace Number One, a thirty-foot-tall stack of four-hundred-pound sandstone blocks, built in large part by enslaved workers who hand-cut each block and dragged it on skids to the site. As many as five hundred enslaved people may have worked here over the war years, felling timber, burning charcoal, mining ore, and operating the blast machinery. Furnaces Two and Three followed in eighteen sixty-two and sixty-three, with partial financing from the Confederate government.

At peak operation, Tannehill's three furnaces produced twenty-two tons of pig iron every day. That iron traveled south to the Selma Arsenal and Gun Works, where it was cast into artillery, cannon shot, camp kettles, and iron stoves for Confederate troops. A foundry and tan yard on site also produced leather goods, harness, canteens, and straps, for the army. It was one of only three-furnace ironworks operating in Alabama during the entire war.

Union General James Wilson's cavalry ended it on March thirty-first, eighteen sixty-five, just a week before Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Three companies of the Eighth Iowa Cavalry rode in, burned the wooden structures to the ground, and rendered the stone furnaces inoperative. The massive stacks were left as they fell.

The Alabama Legislature created Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park around the ruins in nineteen sixty-nine. Walk the grounds today and you can read the ironwork's history in the stones themselves, a fifteen-hundred-acre park built around a memory of fire and forced labor.