When the Furnaces Went Cold

For nearly a century, Birmingham's identity was built on what came out of the ground. Iron ore from Red Mountain, coal from the seams to the west, limestone from the valley floor. These went in one end of the furnaces and pig iron came out the other. The city that had seemed to conjure itself from nothing in eighteen seventy-one was, by the middle of the twentieth century, one of the largest industrial centers in the American South.

Then the furnaces went cold.

The trouble started accumulating in the nineteen sixties. The steel mills that had been built quickly in the industrial boom were aging. Foreign steel was cheaper. Environmental regulations required expensive modifications to plants that their owners were not certain were worth upgrading. The Woodward Iron Company, which had been among the most profitable operations in the district, was forced into bankruptcy in the early nineteen seventies. Sloss-Sheffield ceased operations in nineteen seventy-one. By nineteen eighty, the last of the furnaces in North Birmingham had shut down.

U.S. Steel, which had controlled the largest share of Birmingham's iron and steel operations since the nineteen oh-seven acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad, sold off or closed its Birmingham properties over the same period. The workforce that had depended on steel dropped sharply. Neighborhoods that had housed working families near the mill sites lost population and income.

Birmingham's economy shifted toward medicine and finance, building around the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which had become an independent institution in nineteen sixty-nine and grew into one of the largest employers in the state. The city that was built on iron was rebuilt on hospitals and research. Neither story cancels the other.