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Haunted Road

Don’t Kill Any Mules. Mules Cost Twenty-Five dollars, but Men? Men We Can Replace.

Haunted Road

iHeartPodcasts and Grim & Mild

True Crime, Society & Culture

4.73.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sloss 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.

Special Guest: Kevan Walden

Find out more about Amy's fall tour and upcoming appearances at amybruni.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:06.1

Manky.

0:07.1

Listener discretion is advised.

0:13.4

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

0:19.2

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

0:24.5

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

0:29.7

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

0:35.0

ore was a laborious job that was deathly dangerous.

0:39.7

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

0:46.8

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

0:51.8

bore became disproportionately more perilous.

0:55.4

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

1:00.2

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

1:06.8

it behind.

1:08.7

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

1:18.1

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

1:25.0

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

1:30.6

on one of the world's richest mineral deposits.

1:34.2

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

1:39.5

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

1:45.1

the epicenter of the iron industry in the UK.

1:48.8

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

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