Sloss Furnace
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Sloss Furnace is a National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.A. It functioned as a pig iron-producing blast furnace from 1882 to 1971.The Sloss Furnace site presently serves as an interpretive museum of industry and hosts a nationally- acknowledged metal arts program. It also serves as a performance and festival venue.
In 1880, Colonel James Withers Sloss constituted the Sloss Furnace Company and began building of Birmingham's first blast furnace on 50 acres of land donated by the Elyton Land Company for industrial development.
In 1886, Sloss retired and traded the Sloss Furnace Company to a group of investors who organized it in 1899 as the Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company.
In 1952, the Sloss Furnaces were acquired by the U.S. Pipe and Foundary Company, and sold almost two decades later in 1969 to the Jim Walter Corp.
The Jim Walter Company shut down the Sloss Furnaces two years later, and then donated the property to the Alabama State Fair Authority for possible development as a museum of industry.
In 1976, the Sloss Furnace site was credentialed for the Historic American Engineering Record and its historic significance was detailed in a study commissioned by the city. Birmingham voters approved a $3.3 million bond issue in 1977 to preserve the site.
Preservation and renovation work continues at Sloss Furnaces and funds are being raised for a major expansion of the interpretive facilities in a new visitor's center. The site is nominated to become part of a linear park running east west through downtown Birmingham along the route of the "Railroad Reservation", which was a strip of land partitioned for industrial development in Birmingham's 1871 city plan.
Posted byParvez Ahmed at 1:08 AM
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