BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Pittsburgh of the the industrial head of the entire South between Atlanta and New Orleans, and the chief centre of the iron and coal industry south of Pennsylvania; county-seat of Jefferson County, in the northern centre, is situated mid way between the Coosa and Black Warrior rivers, 608 to 1,000 feet above the sea, in a val ley, near where the last Appalachian spurs sink to the coast plain, 96 miles north of Montgom ery, the State capital, and 168 miles west of Atlanta. Nine railroad systems radiate from Birmingham to every section of the country; the Alabama Great Southern, Seaboard Air Line, Central of Georgia, Illinois Central, At lanta, Birmingham and Atlantic, Southern, Frisco, Louisville and Nashville and Mobile and Ohio. Located in the heart of the greatest coal, iron and limestone district of the South, around it lie three huge coal fields, the Warrior, Cahaba and Coosa, aggregating over 8,610 square miles, with some 60 seams, more than half of them workable; the nearest deposits being only four miles from the city, and all of them having an estimated available supply in 1911 of 68,572,000,000 tons. Birmingham is built partly upon the slope of Red Mountain, named from its outcrop of hematite iron ore, which extends many miles in every direction from the city, in a vein from 6 to 26 feet thick with an indefinite depth. This district produced in 1915 about 95 per cent of the State's production of 17,884,745 tons of coal, 3,526,624 tons of coke and 2,025,378 tons of pig iron. In 1915 1,121,618 freight cars were hauled in and out of Birmingham, carrying 70 per cent. of the entire tonnage of Alabama, and also hauling more than 1,000,000 tons of lime stone. This ideal equipment for the production of iron and steel at the lowest cost is building up a great city with such rapidity that no statistics can be other than temporary. After the census of 1904, Birmingham extended its corporate limits to six times the former area; that is, from 4,270 acres to 30,881 acres. Popu lous suburbs were added in which are manu facturing establishments.
Business Establishments, There are in Jefferson County more than 300 mining and manufacturing plants of various kinds, among which are 27 blast furnaces, 7,168 coke ovens, 60 coal mines, a large number of mines and stone quarries, two steel plants, three rolling mills, a wire rod and nail mill, a steel rail mill, besides other plants of various kinds. In 1912, 255 new companies were organized, with a cap ital of $6,068,300, and existing corporations in creased their capital stock $4,213,900 and made extensions to their plants costing several mil lions. In 1909, according to the Federal census, the city of Birmingham alone had 248 manu facturing establishments of the factory system grade, which were operated on a capital of 23,718,147, employed 10,150 wage earners, paid for wages $4,392,476, for materials used in process $14,009,700, and for all expenses $21, 549,129, and had products aggregating $24,128, 214 in value, nearly one-sixth of the total for the State. These figures showed an increase in 10 years of 139 establishments, $19,404,000 in capital, $3,003,500 in wages, $10,000,000 in cost of materials and $15,530,000 in value of prod ucts. The Birmingham district contains over
50 blast furnaces and more than half of all the iron smelters in the State: and smelting 2,500 tons of iron daily, it became fourth in produc tion of iron in the world in 1908. Ten years before, Birmingham was already furnishing six sevenths of the total United States' export of pig iron, but since then none of the product has been exported on account of the increased home demand. The maximum production of iron ore, pig iron, coal and coke was made in 1910, when the output of iron ore was 4,801,275 long tons; pig iron, 1,969,770 long tons; coal, 16,111,462 short tons, and coke, 3,249,027 short tons; the entire output having a value of $59,614,012. The first steel plant in the South was started in 1897 at Birmingham, two open hearth furnaces of 160 tons a day; now the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad. Company has in operation at Ensley, a suburb, 10 fur naces and a 44-inch blowing mill, capacity 1,000 tons a day. This is the largest basic open hearth plant in the world except the Carnegie works at Homestead. There is a casting plant and rail mill in connection with it. The Ala bama Steel and Shipbuilding Company began in 1899 with $1,000,000 capital, and the Alabama Steel and Wire Company with $2,000,000 capi tal. In recent years, owing to the superior quality of the basic over the Bessemer steel, the demand of the country has been for basic rather than Bessemer steel rails. This change resulted in a production of basic rails in 1911 nine times larger than that of 1905, and of Bessemer rails less than one-third as large. Besides the plants already mentioned, Birming ham has a steel casting plant, a bi-product plant, a wrought pipe plant, cast pipe and foun dry plants, pipe fittings plant, soil pipe plants, clay pipe plant, cement factories, chemical works, fertilizer factories, corn mill, flour mill, ice factories, gas and gasoline engine works, iron and steel bridge works, boiler works, foundries and machine shops, stove foundry, railroad shops, sash factories, wagon factories, agricultural implement works, printing and bookbinding concerns, hollow ware plant, brick plants, planing mills and wood working plants, packing company, etc. Birmingham is the sec ond largest yellow pine market in the South and is also a cotton market, the cotton receipts an nually exceeding 125,000 bales. It has cotton factories, cotton seed oil mills and knitting fac tories. Besides the unparalleled cheapness of its transportation facilities have been greatly increased by the government improve ments on the Warrior and Tombigbee rivers, by which coal and other products are trans ported to tide water at Mobile, thence to the Atlantic seaboard at greatly reduced cost. In 1913 Birmingham produced 17,884,745 tons of coal, 3,526,624 tons of coke, 2,025,378 tons of iron and 778,390 tons of steel. Its bank de posits amounted to $28,883,316, its bank clear ings to $173,857,772.