The age-herald., 1898-01-02

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 Out on Thirteenth street and Avenue B is a great factory. By means of the mills own switches it is really located on every railroad that enters Birmingham. It is the Birmingham rolling mill and steel plant, established in 1880. In all the southern country there is no other steel mill, and in all the country there are only two job ping mills that exceed in size Birming hams great factory. One Is located in Pittsburg, and one in Youngstown, O. The Birmingham mill comes next in the list of
 Jobbing Mills
 A jobbing mill is mill that makes from iron and steel nearly everything the people want. It is not confined to two or three forms. It makes hundreds of different sizes of merchant, bar, band, hoop, angle and shafting iron, round edge tire, sheet plate, tank and boiler iron, firebox, flanges, bridge, car, blow and wagon iron, rails from eight to thirty pounds per yard, tram and strap rails, angle and plain Fish bars. coal screens, small channels-anything in fact that can be made from the best pud- dled iron, or steel. In order to promptly meet any wants that may arise, the com pany carries at all times assortment of these articles amounting to fully 2O0O tons.
 The Mills Themselves
 What tangle of tracks and stacks, in- tense fires and hissing steam they pre- sent at first view! Just imagine twenty one acres of such a bewilderng scene that is what the great plant is. And 75 per cent of the twenty-one acres is cov- cred with buildings. All the acres are covered with buildings, tracks, or piles of materials. There are four miles of stand ard guage track in the grounds, and the company owns two locomotives and ten flat cars, besides a travelling steam crane that is marvel of strength and adapta- biity
 The Wrought Iron
 so largely consumed in these mills, is made under two great roofs, each 320 feet long No. P and Forge Mo- g." In these great buildings are eleven double and twenty four single pudding furnaces, into which pig iron-plain pig iron-is fed direct from flat cars, together with the needful amount of coal and other material. In the myste- rious depths of those furnaces, the pig iron is transformed into an excellent quail ity of wrought iron, and is then taken by great cranes to rolls that fashion it into preliminary shape. The capacity of these furnaces is 14O tons every twenty-four hours.
 In one of the pudding departments is an extra stand of rolls, and new gas fur mace for the heating of steel and other material. This extra stand of rolls is used to reduce steel ingots and iron piles to sheet or tin bar or to billets for
 The Finishing Departments,
 which stand between the Forges, and are perhaps larger and buster than the latter Here we find a 16-inch bar mill, with nec- essary engine, and two large gas furnaces; two S-inch guide mills, each having an en- zine and furnace; one high plate mill, equipped with 72-inch finishing rolls driven direct by large engine, and also two gas furnaces; one high firebed mill, and gas furnace, and two sheet mills for making stove pipe, roofing, and like thin material These finishing mills are each and all of modern construction, and they are suffi- ciently strong to roll steel as well as iron. The sheet and firebed mills are equipped with annealing devices, both box and open fire, together with mighty shears for shear ing up the product. These various mills are crowded with rolls that squeeze the metal as it is passed through them into the thousand and one forms that a com pex civilization calls for. Some of the rolls turn out sheets not much thicker than writing paper. Oftentimes plates are called for thirty feet long, and of all widths up to sixty or seventy inches. The ca- pacity of the finishing mills is 25O gross tons every twenty-four hours, or about 6O,OOO tons year. And these mills roll not only a wide range of shapes and sizes in iron, but they also turn out many forms in sheet-many that could not be made in iron. Here, too, is seen complete
 Machine shop,
 for the repair or reproduction of any part of the intricate machinery we have been inspecting. The lathes and planers and drills and presses and all the variety of machines usually seen in a well-equipped machine shop are here seen also. The ssssseseeeeeese eeeseee