Why is birmingham called the magic city

There are no navigable rivers in the foothills, so raw materials could not be exploited until the trains came. Trains are an important part of the history of Birmingham, and anyone growing up in the city in the first half of the twentieth century would recall the train whistles and the sounds of clacking wheels and hissing and chugging steam engines.

Birmingham was founded at a railroad crossing, and the rail lines that zig-zagged through the valley and across the hills connected mines, mills, and camps to the small core of the city and to the extensive rail lines that joined the area to the rest of Alabama, to the South, and to the world.

This rowdy young city grew from the labor of entrepreneurs, miners, men on the make, who occasionally found themselves sobering up in the Birmingham Jail. From the time when Alabama became a state in until the end of the Civil War in , the valley where the city of Birmingham now stands was an area of small farms.

The pioneers raised corn, and meat came from hogs and wild animals. Cotton was grown mostly for home use. Every house had a spinning wheel. Since little cotton could be transported to market by wagon, there were few slaves in the Alabama hill country, and many people living there did not support secession or the war against the Union. The iron ore that gave Red Mountain its name had long been used by county blacksmiths, but in it was needed for war materials.

With Confederate money men built stone and rock furnaces to smelt the ore with a flux of limestone from the valley floor. Fired by charcoal made from the forests of the hills, furnaces produced pig iron. The iron was sent by wagons to the railhead at Montevallo and shipped to Selma for the Confederate manufacturing plants and arsenal.

A month before the war's end, Union cavalry invaded the valley, destroyed the furnaces, stole all the food they could eat or carry, and passed on, riding south to Selma.

The war was over, but men had learned about the raw materials in the hills of "the mineral district" of northern Alabama, and they knew railroads were needed to bring this wealth to market. And so the railroads were built. In , Birmingham's square blocks were surveyed in a old corn field where the rail lines crossed. East and west, north and south, the trains ran, bringing people, mostly men, to the "Magic City" that had appeared so quickly from vacant farm land. In the beginning, Birmingham, which was named for the industrial city of England, was much more like a wild west town of shootouts, bars, and muddy streets than a southern city of grace and good manners.

Immigrants from Europe joined northern businessmen, freed slaves, ex-Confederates, and county farmers to seek wealth, first from real estate speculation and the businesses and jobs it spawned, then from the opening of mines, the construction of mills, and the building of an industrial economy.

Birmingham was a working town, the only southern city with such a blue-collar-labor base. For the use and purpose of erecting a schoolhouse and school buildings … for the purpose of a free school for the white children now residing in and who may reside hereafter in said city for no other purpose and use whatever. The school is to be taught by white teachers. The city responded to a petition for support from the black community in by paying to hire a teacher for a school bought and supplied by civic-minded blacks.

By , however, neither of the two black schools then existing offered more than six years of instruction; white children could complete the 11th grade. The building of schools for blacks had roughly kept pace with buildings for whites, though the black facilities were demonstrably inferior. The expansion of schools in the first decade of the 20th century would bring virtually no benefits to the black community. The Board of Education had collected insurance for the school but had not replaced it.

Instead, the board rented space in the basement of a neighborhood church, a location that frequently flooded, resulting in classes being dismissed for days at a time. The racial division of labor was stark—skilled craftsmen were all white; unskilled workers, with few exceptions, were black and unorganized—and the introduction of the steel mills in the area at the turn of the century began to undercut the positions of both skilled craftsmen and unskilled workers.

The Penny Savings Bank, founded by the Rev. William Reuben Pettiford in Birmingham in , was the first black-owned and black-operated financial institution in Alabama. Created as a necessity of de facto and later codified segregation, the bank backed and encouraged development of black businesses, especially in urban areas, as well as savings by African Americans, until its closing in The parish began teaching a small group of eight students with two female teachers, both white, who came to Birmingham from New York and Michigan.

Social worker Carrie A. Tuggle opened the Tuggle Institute and School, the first orphan home in Alabama for African American boys and forged a partnership with Birmingham City Schools in McMath in The Shelby Guide in which he predicted that the project to build a cotton factory on the banks of Shoal Creek would make it inevitable that, "Montevallo will eclipse the magic city of Birmingham, and be one of the most flourishing manufacturing cities of the South.

Powell used of the phrase in his annual report to shareholders. Noting the status of the two-year-old city with 4, residents, hundreds of houses and stores, six churches and four hotels, he called Birmingham "this magic little city of ours.

But they do object to the turn you have given it in a stab at the Magic City. Sloss, a man considered to be a visionary in the industry at the time. The result was a massive portfolio of such plants, which he ran under the eventual company name of Sloss-Sheffield Iron and Steel Company , with Sheffield being the major manufacturing center of steel in the UK.

The industry prospered throughout the 20th century until overseas competitors became more economical, and Birmingham began to move into other areas of commerce to keep up with the times. Sloss closed down in , leaving only one major iron and steel works in the region. While this could have been the downfall of the Magic City, today Birmingham is a thriving town with much to offer visitors, and there is one aspect of its history we have yet to mention. With a variety of attractions — the zoo is a favourite with families — and great places to eat or enjoy a drink.

Another great spot is Regions Field.