The Magic City, Born at a Crossing

Every city has a creation story. Birmingham's takes about twenty minutes to explain, because it requires three things happening at once in the same piece of ground.

In eighteen seventy-one, a small group of investors from the Elyton Land Company drove stakes into the Jones Valley of north-central Alabama and laid out a city grid at the crossing of two railroad lines. The city they platted had almost no people and no buildings. What it had was geology.

Jones Valley sits on one of the rarest formations on earth: a place where coal, iron ore, and limestone occur in large surface deposits within a few miles of each other. Anywhere else, making iron from scratch means shipping heavy raw materials across considerable distance. Here, you simply dig in three directions. The investors understood what that meant and named their city after Birmingham, England, the forge capital of the industrial world.

Within about a decade of those first stakes, blast furnaces were running. Within twenty years, Birmingham had grown into the Pittsburgh of the South, and its iron output grew more than tenfold between eighteen eighty and eighteen ninety. The population had jumped from nothing to twenty-six thousand. Boosters called it the Magic City, a name that stuck because the growth genuinely seemed to defy explanation to outsiders who arrived and found a full industrial metropolis where, a decade before, there had been farmland and forest.

The magic, of course, had an explanation. It was coal and ore and limestone and two rail lines crossing at a fortunate angle. It was also labor, vast amounts of it, some free and some not. But the geology came first. The city is built on what the ground offered, and what the ground offered here was almost singular.