The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama

CHAPTER I

THE STORY OF COAL AND IRON IN ALABAMA CHAPTER I THE PLANTING OF THE SEED Beginning of coal and iron business of Alabama. Origin of first iron workers. Organic relation to State. Diversified character of activities. First iron used imported blooms. Tradition of initial service of native iron ore. Indians In possession of country. Highly organized temperament of ancient tribes. Adverse circumstances of later day confronting frontier settlers. Pushmataha quotes General Washington on need for mechanics and tools of industry among Indians. Tombigbee District root ground of institutions of State. Fort St. Stephens, first depot of iron supplies and headquarters of artisans. Biography of Benjamin Hawkins. His progressive attitude towards Indians. Early smiths at Fort Toulouse. Incidents of Bienville's old trading post. Feeble hold of French and Spanish. The great myth of Alabama. Picturesque facts and traditions of Indian origin. Naming of coal fields. Iron ore of Red Mountain as war paint. Ancient festivals of Valley region. Significant background of Birmingham District. IN the mists of the early nineteenth century, when Alabama was an Indian world, the seeds of her coal and iron business were planted. Sown in the wilderness by frontier blacksmiths these two great allied industries - ever close kin to mother earth - were lit during the first years of their growth by the dying Indian fires. Viewed in the light of these fallen embers and with poignant sense of the far geological cycles stretching back into the infinite dark beyond the history of human kind, mine and forge, furnace, mill, shop, and foundry stand out on a vast horizon line. The sturdy figures of the old toilers tramp by with swinging stride early in the dawn and blaze the way for the iron masters riding hard after them. The spirit of the romance of adventure that is in the beginnings of all things, to some, at least, of the 2 THE STORY OF COAL AND IRON IN ALABAMA men who do the dreaming of empires and the pioneering thereof, quickens the young day's planting from dawn until dark. The first recorded incident in the making of the coal and iron business of Alabama belongs to the last decade of the eighteenth century when, at the instance of the United States Indian Agent, Benjamin Hawkins, a crew of blacksmiths was sent to the Creek Nation in lower Mississippi Territory. Together with a number of other smiths, machinists, and wagon-makers, belonging to Andrew Jackson's brigades and mustered out after the War of 1812, these frontiersmen made up the first body of the pioneer coal diggers and iron makers of the State. On the ground before the geologist, they were the original explorers and the discoverers of a large portion of the mineral fields. Straight to them and their crude workings all the back tracks of this history lead. They, their sons, and their grandsons did significant work during the frontier and territorial periods and the first years of statehood to help Alabama learn to carry her own weight from the industrial standpoint. For among them were not only coal miners, forge, furnace, and foundry builders, but also millers, carpenters, tanners, shopkeepers, mechanics, cotton-gin makers, lumber men, boat builders, railroad contractors , and surveyors. To shoe horses, mules, and oxen was only incidental in the daily labor of the frontier smiths. They furnished the first settlers of Alabama with ways and means to conquer the wilderness and to create and maintain permanent settlement. To begin with they made and repaired weapons for the hunt and for defense against the Indians: guns, rifles, knives, and pistols. They turned out every sort of farming tool and implement: axes, plow-tips, harrow teeth, shovels, fire tongs, plow stocks, spades, cow-bells, and picks, besides wagon tires, bolts, nuts, and hinges. They also fashioned a great deal of "hollow ware," as the domestic and kitchen utensils were termed: bake ovens, huge iron pots and cranes, frying pans, skillets, " dog irons," flatirons and firebacks. Moreover, every smith was a farmer and a soldier, too, and a goodly number of them were descended from men who fought in the Revolution. By the year 1819, when Alabama was admitted to the Union, there was not a community in the State without its blacksmith shop and its hardy frontier man-of-work. It was in blacksmith shops as well as in log churches that the first judicial courts of THE PLANTING OF THE...