As I mentioned on our first day introducing Birmingham, all three of the components for making steel was readily available in close proximity to the city. Iron ore, in fact, could be found at Red Mountain, which is about a mile south from downtown.
The iron ore was taken to blast facilities such as the Sloss Furnaces, which operated from 1888 to 1971. The furnaces only produced pig iron, which still has too high of carbon content to be considered steel, but the metal started its journey to that destination here, just northeast of downtown.
The furnaces are now closed, but the grounds are left almost perfectly preserved and open to the public, with liberal access to the buildings for visitors. Really, I always thought Armor Meat Packing Plant would be my favorite industrial ruin in America, but Sloss Furnaces ties the former National City slaughterhouse. And you don’t have to worry about falling through the floor like you used to at Armour!
The blast furnaces was founded by Colonel James Withers Sloss, seen below, but he sold it after just a few years to some investors, and it was renamed Sloss-Sheffield.
I took a lot of photographs, and we’ll explore the site over four days, tracing the circular path Kevin and I took through the grounds.
We first pass by one of two blasts furnaces, above and below; the iron ore would be brought up the conveyor belt in buckets and then dropped down into the inferno below, separating the iron from the slag, which is the impurities in the ore.
As far as I can tell, the structure below is where the iron ore was dumped into a hopper.
Here are more photographs of the blast furnace and the various boilers that generated the intense heat.
Here is the second blast furnace, below.
The extreme heat was created by the burning of coke, which was that highly refined carbon created in the airtight kilns elsewhere in town, like we saw at Bluestone.
Below are the boilers, I believe, that created the hot air for the blast furnaces, with the smokestacks that accompanied them.
We’ll head inside the complex tomorrow.
