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Sloss Furnaces
Twenty 32nd Street North
Birmingham, AL 35222
Visit their website at www.SlossFurnaces.com.

Construction of Sloss's new furnace (City Furnaces) began in June 1881, when ground was broken on a fifty-acre site that had been donated by the Elyton Land Company. Harry Hargreaves, a European-born engineer, was in charge of construction. Hargreaves had been a pupil of Thomas Whitwell, a British inventor who designed the stoves that would supply the hot-air blast for the new furnaces. Sixty feet high and eighteen feet in diameter, Sloss's new Whitwell stoves were the first of their type ever built in Birmingham and were comparable to similar equipment used in the North.

Sloss received National Historic Landmark designation in 1981 and opened its gates in September 1983, as a museum of the City of Birmingham. Its collection consists of two 400-ton blast furnaces and some forty other buildings.

The dramatic scale and complexity of the plant's industrial structure, machines and tools make the Sloss collection a unique contribution to the interpretation of twentieth-century ironmaking technology and presents a remarkable perspective on the era when America grew to world industrial dominance. At the same time, Sloss is an important reminder of the hopes and struggles of the people who worked in the industries that made some men wealthy, and Birmingham the "Magic City."