The age-herald., 1901-03-28
BIRMINGHAM.
From the Baltimore Sun.

From the Baltimore Sun.
 Owing to the larges amount of Balti- more capital invested in Birmingham and vicinity and the number of Baltimore people who have relatives and friends in that city, much interest was manifested locally yesterday in the situation in the southern city. The telephones in The Sun office were kept busy from noon until late at night with anxious inquiries. H. Gordon and J. William Middendorf are directors in the Alabama Consolidated Coal and Iron Company, one of the large industries of the Birmingham district. MT. A Hawksley Rutherford, of Midden- dorf, Oliver & Co.,, bankers, said:
 Whatever loss was sustained by the Alabama Coal and Iron Company must have been trivial, as the bulk of the com panys property is located at Gadsden and Ironton and in Tuscaloosa County. The company's only interests in the Birming- ham district are the Mary Pratt furnace at Birmingham and the Gate City prop erty, consisting of ore and lime beds about five miles from the city. The lat ter could not have been damaged, and as the Mary Pratt is the smallest of the company's furnaces, the loss at that place could not have been great"
 Messrs. William c. Seddon & Go. are interested In the Sheffield Steel and Iron Company.
 MT. Bartlett s. Johnston, of Baltimore has a brother living In Birmingham.
 Birmingham is situated at the foot of Red Mountain, a formation holding be- sides vast limestone deposits an iron hematite ore vein of remarkable extent and easily accessible to miners. It all most touches the great Warrior, Caha- ba and Coosa coalhelds. Iron and steel are manufactured under he most favor able conditions. With this as a founda- tion the growth of the city in the past twenty-five or thirty years is hardly a matter for surprise. From a population of 1000 in the early seventies and 5000 in 1880 Birmingham has. according to the last census, population of sS,415, an in- crease of 46.75 per cent over the census of 1890.
 The first furnace was erected In Birm- ingham in 1880 and the progress of the city has been steady and rapid. Writing last summer from Birmingham a corre- spondent of the Iron Age referred to an ''upheaval going on here in the way of improvements" 'The steel plant" said the Ages correspondent, has been re- constructed. The old furnaces have been torn away and new ones, heavier and stronger, installed and the number of gas-producers increased. The Fort Payne outfit has been put up there, consisting of fourteen steam boilers and six gas producers, the old boilers being removed Both pudding mills have been overhaul ed and all the latest labor-saving devices inaugurated, as we'll as those securing greatest efficiency in results. Four gas heating furnaces have been built on new improved plans and these will be used at bar mill and guide mills. Six hundred feet of new gas sewer, four by six feet, has been built to supply these furnaces.
 Two new bar mill and guide mills. Six hundred feet guide, plate and fire bed mills. Plate shears weighing 150 900 pounds have been put in, as we'll as 112- foot squaring shears. Then two hydrau- lie doubling machines have been erected as also two cold roofing mills-the rolls being 25 inches by 70 feet. The new en- zine for the plate mills has foundation in which 100000 bricks were used and is 15O0 horse power. Then there is a new patent charging machine for slabs, bil- lets and ingots The xkal character
  equal to the building ew mill. To