Kansas City daily journal., 1897-01-03

2JkY eltCllOH OI hChlllSy
!. !. ; : /. J !.
SN S4Y and the indications
80 that there will be |
~ a steady increase in
~ the output from now
II y on. l spent some
<kSr time at Birmingham
which, You know. had
such Il boom not long
F. G.. CARPENTER. ago, but which is
now doing business a good financial
basis. Birmingham is the biggest iron pro-
ducer south of Pittsburg. There are twen-
ty-siX iron furnaces within thirty miles of
the town, which have a daily output of
almost 1000 tons of pig iron. They employ
nearly 4,O00 men and pay wages of $780, 900
month. They claim to make iron cheaper
than anywhere else in the world, and one
OF the furnace companies shipped some of
its product not long ago to London and
sold 1t there at profit.
Big Money in Iron.
The South is doing its business on big,
broad scale. There is an enormous amount
of money invested, and / visited the fur
naces of one company which has capital
stock of $2l,O00.000. This is the Tennessee
Coal and Iron Company. 1t has mines
scattered throughout Tennessee and Ala
bama, and 1 am told that its property is
worth as much as one of the small Eu-
ropean kingdoms. 1t has a vast area of
tOdi DtuS anu II IS UOW INNING more tnan
17e00 tons of coal a day. 1t owns noun
tains of iron ore and last year it produced
more than half million tons of pig iron
and more than three and one-half million
tons of coal. visited its coke ovens at the
town of Bessemer, south of Birmingham,
ind was told that the ovens there, together
with the others owned by the company,
make almost 5000 tons of coke day, while
out of its Alabama iron mines alone are
e IONS Of
This is perhaps the biggest company of the
South, but there are other large establish
mentS, and you may look for an enormous
industrial development there within the
next few years.
Coal and Iron Hugging Each Other.
The coal and iron of the South are fairly
hugging each other. They lie side by side
and when their marriage takes place in the
furnaces with the aid of the f1eecy bridal
veil of limestone, which is also found near
by, they can produce industrial children in
the shape of iron and steel more chaaply
than their kind in any other portion of the
world. Next to Alabama the greatest iron
mines of the United States are along Lake
Superior. The biggest coal beds are in
Pennsylvania, more than thousand miles
away. The limestone is also far off and the
products have to travel hundreds of miles
before they can come together. Chicago
makes vast deal of iron. 1t gets its ore
from Lake Superior and its coal from Penn
Sylvania. 1t is the same with Cleveland
and Toledo, but the freight rates on the
Great lakes are low that we are able to
shoe the seven-league boots of our indus
trial progress with iron. Even at such
great distances we have brought the iron
and coal together and have made ourselves
the greatest iron manufacturers of the
world. A little over ten years ago Great
Trifn tow ,N;r,
iron as we did. We caught up to her in
1890, and we now beat her in the prCduc-
ton of both iron and steel. I have only the
figures of 1892 before me. In that year
and every year since then we have led the
world in these respects In 1892 we made
more than one-fourth of all the iron ard
steel in the world, and Germany and Gleat
Britain Jagged far behind us on the metal
lie road. Then the world produced 57,y0O000
tons of iron, and our share of this was ever
IL, 600 900 tons. Our pig iron product that
year was worth more than all our sold end
silver.
Where the Worlds Iron Comes From.
There is no doubt that we are to furnish
the greater part of the iron for the world
in the future. We have bigger ore beds
than any other country and our coal fields
are practically ineXhaustible. There is
enough coal in Alabama to do all the man.
years to come. 1 was told at Bessemer that
the available coal of Alabama alone if it
could be put into a lump would make a
solid chunk seventy miles long by sixty
miles broad, and ten feet thick. Such a
lump would, it is estimated, furnish TO-
900 tons of coal a day for more than
i, 900 years, or a million tons day for lis
years. But Alabama has only Il small
| amount of the great Appalachian coal
fields. These fields end somewhere in Ala
bama. They run from there northward a
distance, it is said, of about 800 miles, and
they are from thirty to $50 miles wide.
| They furnish about two-thirds of all
our bituminous coal output, and we pro-
duce, you know, about one-third of all the
| coal in the world. In 1894 we mined no.,
| 100000 tons of COAL while the whole world
produced only 10000, 600 tons. The only
| country which beat us that year was Great
| Britain. We have thousands of square
| miles of coal lands outside of the Appa-
! lachian fields and there are great unde-
veloped coal areas in the West. l was told
| of a great iron mountain which is to be
| opened by a railroad from Salt Lake City
| to Los Angeles during my stay in Utah,
| and there are large iron deposits in Mis-
| souri, To-day the leading countries of the
| world which produce iron are Great Brit
| ain, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary
| Russia, Belgium and Sweden. Spain mines
| a great deal of iron ore, but she ships the
| most of it to England. 1 heard of big un-
| developed iron mines in China during my
| stay there, and there are some good mines
| in Mexico and Central America. There is
| one iron region in Cuba and you find small
| beds scattered throughout the West India
| Islands. The great bulk of the product of
| this hemisphere, however, comes from the
| United States, and as have said. the in
| dications are that our resources have not
yet been touched.
A Good Iron business Means Good
Times.
| 1t is said that a good iron business means
| good times, and that prosperity and the re-
| verse in the United States rise and fall
| with the prices of steel rails. If this is so,
| we are on the eve of good times, for the
| iron industries of the country are picking
| up. The foundries of PittSburg and Cleve-
| land have taken back their men, and the
| mines of iron and coal are being worked
| along Lake Superior as well as in the
| South. A report was published last week
| stating that the Carnegie and Rockefeller
| iron and steel interests have united, and
| that the new combination has 800 600 900
| capital behind it. Rockefeller owns some
| of the biggest iron mines of Lake Superior
| The Carnegie company has the biggest
| steel works in the world, and this COM
| bination will result in an enormous pro
| duction of iron and steel at the lowest cost
! The Lake Superior iron mines are wonder
| full. / visited some of them a year or so
| ago. Many of them are located from 100
| to 1,S00 feet above Lake Superior, and from
| fifteen to 100 miles from the water. The
| iron is worked down to distance of about
1850 feet below ground. The mining is