Not until 1927 did this device end the extremely hazardous process of stoking the furnace at the top by hand, 30 years after mechanization in comparable northern plants. On one side of the furnace, one can examine the skip hoist, a mechanized pulley system that carried raw ore and coke from arriving rail cars up to the furnace mouth (unfortunately not accessible to visitors). 1 Furnace, where the superheated air was used to smelt iron ore. The next stop is the torpedo like brick-lined stoves used to heat the air blast to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit in preparation for the furnace, then up a steel stairway to a catwalk that runs around the No.
The tour roughly follows the path of the industrial process itself, beginning with the enormous air blast generated at the blower building, basically a giant bellows.
#Shadow era draw engines free#
As the on-site blacksmith, who works a small forge in the shadow of the furnaces, remarked to me, to modern eyes it is astonishing that the plant actually worked.Ī visitor is free to wander at will to get a feel for the place, but the "self-guided tour" that winds through the maze of pipes, boilers, stoves, and engines is absolutely essential to grasp the actual operation of the furnace and the manufacture of iron. Rail line spurs and hoists for iron ore and coke, enormous engines to pump air, 12 tall, cylindrical hot blast stoves to heat it, six large boilers to produce steam to power the entire plant, and a network of giant pipes to integrate the entire process give the site a fantastic appearance-it resembles nothing more than the bizarre, simultaneously archaic and futuristic world of the film Brazil. But the molten iron that flowed several times a day from the "notch" at the base of the furnace was a product of a complex process dependent on a vast assemblage of machinery to harness the raw energy needed to put a furnace "in blast." The two enormous blast furnaces, over 70 feet high, dominate the 17-acre site. In the post-industrial age of the microchip, the sheer immensity of the plant almost defies belief. 2 This "history you can touch and smell" (in the words of a tourist brochure) is well worth a visit for anyone interested in the industrial, technological, or labor history of the postbellum South. However, recognizing that "one of the modern day resources we have to draw upon is the potential benefits that can be derived from a relic of our early development," an unusual combination of boosters and community activists successfully saved Sloss from the wrecker's ball, and in 1981 the site was designated a national historic landmark open to visitors. A major site of pig-iron production in the Birmingham District for 90 years, Sloss shut down in 1970, long after Birmingham had passed its prime as an industrial center. Only two miles from the new banks and office buildings of downtown Birmingham, and dominating city vistas from the surrounding hills and superhighways, stands a relic of the bygone industrial era: the Sloss Furnaces. The winding streets and Victorian homes in the hills above town bespeak southern gentility, but the rail lines that bisect the basin below, lined with brick industrial buildings surrounded by turn-of-the-century working class neighborhoods betray a past at odds with images of pastoral Dixie. In fact, the city's physical landscape reveals this story more readily than it does the struggle for racial justice.
While these icons of the civil rights struggle justly dominate Birmingham's historical consciousness, the city King called "the most segregated in America" was also known as the "Pittsburgh of the South." Indeed, Birmingham has a significant history of coal, iron, and steel production, and in the late 19th century the "Birmingham District" became the industrial heartland of the Deep South, and consequently the locus of the south's first free industrial proletariat. Think of the city of Birmingham, Alabama, and Bull Connor, Martin Luther King, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and the Birmingham jail readily come to mind. The site was both foreboding as a focus of study and contaminated with cadmium." It was a challenging place to do archeology.
"Standing in the cold, numbing rain, I was surrounded by a sea of brick rubble rusting car bodies. Engine of Injustice: African American Labor and Technological Change at the Sloss Furnaces
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