Sloss Furnaces
Interesting facts
- It is billed as the only 20th-century blast furnace site in the United States preserved as a museum.
- The two original furnaces followed the Whitwell design of an English inventor, built by Harry Hargreaves, who had studied under Thomas Whitwell himself.
- Just a year after the first blast, Sloss iron won a bronze medal at the 1883 Southern Exposition in Louisville, Kentucky.
- The Elyton Land Company, which laid out Birmingham, donated the 50 acres on which the furnaces were built.
- Superintendent James Pickering Dovel ran construction for 21 years from 1909 and was credited with 17 patents for furnace improvements.
- Like other Alabama industrial firms of its era, the company relied on leased convict labour, overwhelmingly Black, until 1928.
- Folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham collected workers' ghost stories in her 1987 book on the furnaces, giving the site a lasting haunted reputation.
- The tale of a cruel foreman called Slag Wormwood who fell into a furnace is fiction, invented to promote a Halloween attraction at the site.
- Birmingham voters approved a bond issue in 1977 to rescue the abandoned plant from demolition and preserve it.
- During the 2022 World Games, the old ironworks became a venue for sport climbing, breaking and parkour.
Why it is worth it
Sloss Furnaces is a forest of iron: two blast furnaces about 18 metres tall, rows of riveted hot-blast stoves, water towers, pipes that loop overhead and dive into the ground, casting sheds and the engine rooms that once kept air roaring into the furnaces. Being able to walk freely through a complete ironworks is rare, and the scale and rust-brown textures of the plant give it a strange, sculptural beauty, especially at dusk, when the silhouettes of the stacks stand against the sky above the Birmingham skyline.
The company was founded in 1881 by Colonel James Withers Sloss, one of the men behind the city of Birmingham itself, which grew up precisely because coal, limestone and iron ore, the three ingredients of pig iron, lie close together in the surrounding hills. The first furnace was blown in during April 1882 and produced about 24,000 tons of iron in its first year. Blowers and boilers were renewed in the early 1900s, and between 1927 and 1929 the furnaces were rebuilt with modern equipment; most of what stands today dates from that rebuilding, when the two furnaces together could turn out around 900 tons of iron a day. At one time Sloss was among the largest producers of pig iron in the world.
The furnaces drew thousands of workers from the countryside and from abroad, among them formerly enslaved people and European immigrants, and the museum does not hide the other side of that story: racial injustice, the breaking of unions and dangerous, gruelling work in heat and fumes. Company housing known as the Sloss Quarters once stood nearby. Iron production ended in 1971, the site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1981, and it opened to the public in 1983. Today it is a museum owned by the city, and it has also become a place where iron is made again on a small scale: a resident metal arts programme teaches casting and fabrication, and the site hosts a national conference on cast-iron art as well as concerts and festivals among the stacks.
Getting there
Sloss Furnaces stands on 32nd Street North in Birmingham, Alabama, about 1 km from the city centre. Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport (BHM) is about 6 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Sloss Furnaces is a National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, Alabama in the United States. It operated as a pig iron-producing blast furnace from 1882 to 1971. After closing, it became one of the first industrial sites in the U.S. to be preserved and restored for public use. In 1981, the furnaces were designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior.
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