Welcome to Haunted Road, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Erin

Manky.

Listener discretion is advised.

You might say that Birmingham, Alabama, was faded to become a center of industry, a

place made rich by manufacturing products and shipping them across the globe.

But all of that prosperity came at a cost, a human cost.

Birmingham quickly became a center of iron production, but smelting all that iron

ore was a laborious job that was deathly dangerous.

Men sustained terrible injuries and were sometimes cooked alive from exposure to the molten iron.

And as racial inequity and hostility toward black Americans grew, the burden those men

bore became disproportionately more perilous.

The sloths furnaces contain the ghosts of some of the darkest moments in Birmingham's

history, and it's all still there today, being relived by those who won't or can't leave

it behind.

I'm Amy Bruney, and this is Haunted Road.

When Birmingham was founded in 1871, its planners envisioned a rich future in an Appalachian

Valley in North Central, Alabama, the city sat at the crossroads of two railroad lines

on one of the world's richest mineral deposits.

Hopes to establish a town with considerable industry were so high that investors in the

Elleton Land Company, the founding company of the city, named it after Birmingham, England,

the epicenter of the iron industry in the UK.

The plan worked, thanks in large part to sloths furnaces, a processing plant that extracted

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