In the years following the Civil War, railroad men, land developers and speculators moved into
Jones Valley to take advantage of the area’s rich mineral resources. All the ingredients needed
to make iron lay within a thirty-mile radius. Seams of iron ore stretched for 25 miles through
Red Mountain, the southeastern boundary of Jones Valley. To the north and west were abundant
deposits of coal, while limestone, dolomite, and clay underlay the valley itself. In 1871
southern entrepreneurs founded a new city called Birmingham and began the systematic
exploitation of its minerals.

One of these men was Colonel James Withers Sloss, a north Alabama merchant and railroad man.
Colonel Sloss played an important role in the founding of the city by convincing the L&N Railroad
to capitalize completion of the South and North rail line through Jones Valley, the site of the
new town. In 1880, having helped form the Pratt Coke and Coal Company, which mined and sold
Birmingham’s first high-grade coking coal, he founded the Sloss Furnace Company, and two years
later “blew-in” the second blast furnace in Birmingham.

During the 1880s, as pig iron production in Alabama grew from 68,995 to 706,629 gross tons, no
fewer than nineteen blast furnaces would be built in Jefferson County alone. Per Dr. W. David
Lewis, author of Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District, Sloss Furnaces was
born at a time when the “doldrums of the postwar era had ended and the South was feeling a
measure of confidence for the first time since the opening years of the Civil War.”

Between 1927 and 1931 the plant underwent a concentrated program of mechanization. Most of its
major operation equipment—the blast furnaces and the charging and casting machinery–was
replaced at this time. In 1927-28, the two furnaces were rebuilt, enlarged, and refitted with
mechanical charging equipment, doubling the plant’s production capacity.

Nothing remains of the original furnace complex. The oldest building on the site dates from
1902 and houses the eight steam-driven “blowing-engines” used to provide air for combustion in
the furnaces. The engines themselves date from the period 1900-1902 and are a unique and
important collection—engines such as these powered America’s Industrial Revolution. The
boilers, installed in 1906 and 1914, produced steam for the site until it closed in 1970.

Sloss received National Historic Landmark designation in 1981 and opened its gates in September 1983, as a museum of the City of Birmingham. Its collection consists of two 400-ton blast furnaces and some forty other buildings.

Sloss is currently the only twentieth-century blast furnace in the U.S. being preserved and interpreted as an historic industrial site.
The dramatic scale and complexity of the plant’s industrial structure, machines and tools make the Sloss collection a unique contribution
to the interpretation of twentieth-century ironmaking technology and presents a remarkable perspective on the era when America grew
to world industrial dominance. At the same time, Sloss is an important reminder of the hopes and struggles of the people who worked
in the industries that made some men wealthy, and Birmingham the “Magic City.