The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XVIII BIRMINGHAM MILITANT 1876-1880 Crisis in coal business. Troubles behind the scenes of Eureka company. Incoming of Truman H. Aldrich, first of the big pioneer coal operators of Alabama. Review of his career. Interesting points in Aldrich family history. Antebellum conditions as depicted by John T. Milner. Resume of Montevallo history. An unprecedented act: digging coal in midsummer. Succession of coal Iileams in Warrior field ascertained. On a still hunt for coking coal. Extent and full value of Pratt seam demonstrated by Aldrich. Acquisition of coal lands. Combination of Sloss, DeBardeleben, and Aldrich. Pratt Coal and Coke Company first large coal company of Alabama launched. Pratt mines opened. "The sound of the hammer and the saw is heard again in Birmingham." Gathering of forces for leadership. Foundations for city of Birmingham laid on cheap coal. Success of Pratt mines. Start of industrial development . Points of policy affecting future generations settled by pioneers. Operation of mines limited to the individual. Mileage and freight rates fixed. Encouraging conditions of Elyton Land company. Recollections of Captain A. C. Danner. Birmingham becomes center of industrial life of State. Policy of M. H. Smith, president of Louisville and Nashville railroad. His durable and splendid public work. ALTHOUGH the happy termination of the trials of the Experimental Company promised daylight, as has been seen, it was misty weather that followed, after all. The progress of the new Eureka Company suffered because the Louisville and Cincinnati factions controlling it could not come to an agreement on any proposition either of policy, financing, or operation. DeBardeleben held on to the small block of stock he had retained at the transfer of the properties. Each of the syndicates, looking towards majority control, desired to purchase it. "But I would not sell," remarked the colonel. "I knew if either party got full control the property would go to pieces again. So I stayed umpire to keep the peace." DeBardelcben was then not much on the Birmingham ground. He was up in Jackson County more or less with Eugene Gordon, looking for coal. For by this time Henry F. DeBardeleben had contracted the fever of prospecting, - the hunger and the urge for the field that has never left him from that day to this; curiosity , indeed, to read the book of the ground and eagerness to BIRMINGHAM MILITANT 1876-1880 267 suck profit out of the ground. He had quit. the cotton gin works at Prattville for good and all and plunged head first into the coal fields. Colonel Sloss, too, was diving around for coal. Neither the extent nor capacity of the seam of coal discovered by Billy Goold had been determined in 1877. The coal at Helena was not adapted for a really first-class coke, and at any rate, was getting thin and faulty, and had begun to play out. Montevallo coal was solely of domestic grade. Up to the launching of the Helena mines Montevallo had no formidable commercial rival, but had things quite its own way, as its owner, Truman H. Aldrich, ordered. Sighting the horizon and foreseeing a crisis in the coal business of the State, as well as in his own holdings, Mr. Aldrich came up from Montevallo, where he had been located for five or six years, to the Birmingham District in 1877, on a still hunt for a steam and coking coal. The name of Truman H. Aldrich heads the list of the first big coal operators of Alabama. No scientific or genuinely practical methods were applied to coal mining in this State until the early eighteen-seventies when Mr. Aldrich came into the field. He was a graduate in mining and civil engineering of the Van Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York, of the class of 1869, and was one of the first mining engineers and technically trained men in the South. Among his college fellows and fast friends was Frank Hearne, for whom young Frank Hearne Crockard, vice-president of the Tennessee Company, is named. Another Troy man besides Truman Aldrich, who was identified with the coal and iron industry in Alabama, was Michael Tuomey, who belonged to a class of the generation before. Although Mr. Aldrich is aNew Yorker by birth, his family tree is old and deeprooted in New England soil. For three hundred years his folk, mainly Quakers, have been teachers, lawyers, bankers, and writers; the scholar vein, indeed, well-worked. Of note in the present generation among his kin are Thomas Bailey Aldrich...