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PREFACE TO THE 2011 EDITION
- The University of Alabama Press
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PREFACE TO THE 2011 EDITION It has been 100 years since Ethel Armes, a former reporter for the Birmingham Age-Herald, wrote her epic history, The Story if Coal and Iron in Alabama. Yet her book, as if transcending time, remains the most referenced book on iron manufacture in Alabama. It is in truth the bible of all such writings, weaving hard facts and real life stories into an exciting tale of how a great industry came to Birmingham and challenged the fiery furnaces of Pittsburgh. Certainly, at no other place in America, did the basic iron industry flourish in such great crescendo in the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries as in Birmingham. As a prelude to steel, it was an amazing story. Ms. Armes penned her encyclopedic 581-page book during the city's "golden age," when it grew as if by magic into Alabama's leading center of iron production. Because of the Birmingham mills, in 191O-the year her book was published-Alabama ranked third in the nation in iron ore mining at 4.8 million tons. It also ranked fourth in pig iron production accounting for an annual record that year of 1.9 million tons, 7 percent of the national total. In 1910, the "Magic City" had 132,685 residents, surging ahead of Mobile as the state's largest city. By 1900, Jefferson County had over 300 mining and manufacturing establishments engaged chiefly in the production of iron, coal, and coke, most of them in Birmingham and the near suburbs. The total grew substantially over the next decade. It was this growing hum of industrial activity that captivated her imagination upon arriving from Washington, D.c., where she had worked at the Washington Post after a stint at the Chicago Chronicle. Joining the staff of the Birmingham Age-Heraldin 1905, she said the underlying theme of Birmingham's existence--iron and coal-was XVI PREFACE everywhere. From the ore mines on Red Mountain to new furnaces at Ensley and Woodward to the start of a new worker village that would become Fairfield, the image of escalating industry was omnipresent. So was a bitter coal miner's strike in 1908. "The idea of The Story if Coal and Iron in Alabama came to me the second day after arriving in Birmingham during the late fall of 1905 when I saw Red Mountain and my first mines," she wrote in a biographical memoranda in 1916, to Thomas M. Owen, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. "The mining world was a new world. Something of its drama and romance has stirred me when in Chicago two years before, when hearing of the Mesabi Range. "Not being able to find any book giving me the information upon the Alabama mines which I sought, I decided to write one, feeling that at last I had come across a subject absolutely new and a region unexplored, historically." Armes detailed her thoughts in filling out a questionnaire Owen had sent in preparation for his own classic book, The History if Alabama and Dictionary if Alabama Biography, published in 1921. At first she said her ideas for The Story if Coal and Iron were "vague and formless" but gradually took shape as she became familiar with the industry and the early pioneers of the Birmingham district. "The book was kept in heart and mind five years before an agency was selected to finance it. ... After a long seeking and many discouragements a response came to my request from the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce." The business group, which included a number of mining and manufacturing executives, formed a committee to work with her chaired by Truman H. Aldridge, a mining engineer, coal mining executive, and former congressman; along with George B. McCormack and John E. Ware. Aldridge, formerly with the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company and the Sloss-Sheffield Steel &Iron Company, was president of the Montevallo Coal Mining Company. McCormack was president of the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company and Ware had retired as general manager of the Jenifer Furnace Company near Munford and as an executive with the Clifton Iron Company at Anniston. [54.163.14.144] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:52 GMT) PREFACE XVll The committee, she wrote, "gave the most constant and valuable assistance in the work of gathering material. Men and women in Birmingham and in many parts of the state assisted in the compilation of these records." Aldridge, who had been general manager at Sloss, wrote...