energy – Perspectives on the Road

Birmingham, Alabama, founded in 1871 during the post civil war reconstruction period, was called the “magic city” because of its fast pace of growth during the period from 1881 through 1920. The city’s population expanded from 3,000 in 1880 to 260,000 by 1930. Birmingham was built at the crossing of Alabama & Chattanooga and South & North Alabama railroads. It had nearby deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone – the three main raw materials used in making steel and iron. Birmingham is the only place in the world where these minerals can be found in significant quantities and in close proximity, so Birmingham was planned from the start as a steel and iron producing industrial city. (Wikipedia).

It also had a competitive advantage over northern industrial cities: cheap labor. The availability of a large population of destitute freedmen and impoverished whites in the vicinity of the coalfields offered mine owners an important advantage: workers who were both desperate enough to settle for meager wages and so thoroughly divided along racial lines that they would not organize to protest their predicament or so those in power thought. They did not anticipate the formation of one of the South’s few viable interracial labor unions, District 20 of the United Mine Workers. In 1908, they went on strike for two months, but the strike was crushed by the mine owners when they convinced Alabama Governor Comer to send in the Alabama National Guard.

Coal miners, United Mine Workers District 20, 1908

A nationwide depression in the 1890s caused mining and furnace companies inAlabama to fail. Sloss and Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad (TCI) purchased some of these firms and greatly expanded their operations. Sloss reorganized as the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in 1899 and became the second-largest iron manufacturer in the state. Later, outside investors from New York gained control of Sloss and TCI, and Pioneer was absorbed by Ohio-based Republic Iron and Steel Company, leaving Woodward as the only locally owned ironmaking firm. (https://encyclopediaofalabama.org)

The Great Depression that began in 1929 devastated Birmingham’s economy. Production of steel and pig iron shrank to the lowest levels since 1896, and operations at TCI, Republic, Sloss-Sheffield, and Woodward were drastically curtailed. Business leaders fought bitterly against labor reforms enacted under the New Deal, particularly the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which aimed to raise the wages of southern laborers to the level of their northern counterparts. Labor unions won recognition against strong resistance, but unemployment reached unprecedented levels.(https://encyclopediaofalabama.org)

Industrialists soon realized that Alabama’s coal reserves, which remained plentiful, commanded higher prices in foreign markets than coke-fired pig iron, which was becoming uneconomical to produce. In 1970, USP&F’s last active furnace in Birmingham, one of the two that had been remodeled on the site of the original Sloss Furnace Company, shut down for good. In 1980, Jim Walter Corporation closed the huge new furnace that USP&F had erected in North Birmingham in 1956, then dismantled and sold it for scrap. Even Woodward, long the most profitable company in the Birmingham District, was forced out of business in the early 1970s, and only U.S. Steel’s Fairfield plant remained in production.

From its highest population of 340,887 in 1960, the population was down to 200,733 in 2020, a loss of about 41 percent. White flight to the suburbs after the city was integrated in the late 1960’s contributed to the population decline. Today most of the metropolitan area lies outside the city itself. Other businesses and industries such as banking, telecommunications, transportation, electrical power transmission, medical care, college education, and insurance have diversified the Birmingham economy. Mining in the Birmingham area is no longer a major industry with the exception of coal mining.

We are now in the heart of coal country in southern Virginia near the Kentucky border. Almost all of the small towns carved out of the steep mountains are decreasing in population and struggling to replace coal as an economic engine for the community. The large coal companies have left for places like Colorado, leaving small outfits like the one above.

In the 1880s, coal deposits became the dominant resource utilized in the area. Immigration trends and economic conditions across the country attracted many people to the area for work, including African Americans and Irish, Polish, Italian, and Hungarian immigrants. In the 1970s, the change in regulations and the OPEC oil embargo drove up the price of coal and created a boom for the coal economy in the region. New mines were opened and existing mines expanded. The boom lasted until 1983, when coal prices declined, mines were opened in western states in the U.S and mining technology reduced the demand for coal miners.The boom turned into a bust. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3590402) As our country attempts to deal with climate change, regulations have been put in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect public health. And coal is being replaced by lower-cost natural gas and renewable energy sources.

So what are these communities to do? They are isolated, with no population centers close by to attract new business customers or commute to new jobs. There are still jobs in the lumber industry, confirmed by all of the log trucks we passed on the mountain roads, although this industry is in decline as well. And they do have another major rural employer in Wise County, the prison industry. Virginia’s two highest security “super max” state prisons are located in Wise County: Red Onion State Prison, opened in 1998, and Wallens Ridge State Prison, opened in 1999.^[3](Wikepedia). According to a local former miner we spoke with, many former coal miners have become prison guards. But this is not keeping the towns thriving. There are many boarded up stores and signs of decline.

Many of the towns are trying to attract outdoor adventure tourists. A big attraction now is atv trailing that takes advantage of the steep mountain trails; we saw that in several towns they allow atvs on the town streets. It is not at all clear that many of these towns will make a come back, although not for lack of effort. We met Jim, a lawyer in Williamson, WV, who was working hard on bringing the arts and other tourist attractions to Williamson. It is clear there is a great deal of effort expended to recreate these tiny towns.

Tag: energy

Birmingham, The Magic City

The Economic Boom and Bust in Coal Country