Sloss Furnaces

The furnaces stand at the meeting of three materials and many lives. Iron ore, coal and limestone lay close enough to Birmingham to make a new industrial city possible. At Sloss, those materials became pig iron. The machinery that survives gives the process an enormous visible scale, while the workers' histories explain what it required.

James Withers Sloss founded his furnace company in 1880. Construction at the City Furnaces site began the following year, and the plant went into blast in April 1882. Birmingham itself was scarcely more than a decade old. Railroads connected its mineral resources with markets well beyond Alabama, and ironmaking helped shape the city's future.

The company grew after Sloss retired and sold it in 1886. It eventually took the name Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron, though its business was pig iron rather than making steel. Furnaces depended on a larger network of mines, quarries, coke production and transport. The industrial landscape extended far beyond the stacks.