The age-herald., 1901-02-15
TAKEN ON 4 TRIP
 AROUND THE HORN Cincinnati Business Men Shown Wonders of the District WERE GREATLY PLEASED Delighted and Amazed at the Natural Resources and Development-Es-
 corted By Local Committees.
 Details of the Trip.
WERE GREATLY PLEASED


 recent years h've been more thoroughly | enjoyed than the one yesterday in which the party of representative business men from Cincinnati participated. The excur- sion was arranged jointly by the Commer- cial Club and the Board of Trade in honor of the visitors and the details were in charge of Culpcpper Exum, J. B. Gibson, | E. A. DeFuniak, John w. O'Ncill and G. | R. Browdcr.
 The Cincinnati party, thirty-one strong, | in charge of Col. D. A. Tompkins of Char | lotte, N. C., and M. V. Richards indus trial agent of the Southern Railway, ar rived in the city on | special train over the Southern Railway at 7:15 o'clock | two hours ahead of tho tiiuc fixed for its | arrival. According to arrangements the party was met at 3 o'clock by commit tees from the Commercial Club and Board of Trade, and shortly after 10 | o'clock left the union passenger station | for a trip around the district. The first stop was made at Ishkooda, where the visitors observed with great interest the operation of the ore mines After an hour spent about the mines the party gathered on the top of the moun- tain and listened to a speech by Col. L.. w. Johns of Sayreton. John W. O'Neili introduced tho orator as one of the pio- neer developers of the district.
 Colonel Johns Speech. l Colonel Johns spoke as follows:
 MT. President of the Board of Trade | and Gentlemen:
 T can assure you that I am sensible of I ha ha,, L.. | asking me to address the gentlemen from | north of the Ohio River.
 | T will now say, gentlemen, you are in
 the midst of our great district where you | can see with your naked eye more coal | and iron at one glance than any country that Gods sun shines on. I can take you
 on top of Red Mountain, which runs | parallel with the A. c. S. Railroad for | 164 miles by two miles wide You car there stand on twenty-four feet of 5t | per cent metallic iron ore and see the | Great Warrior, Cahaba and Coosa coa l fields within four miles of you each way l with enough lime stone in the valley tc | Aux the ore of the world In summer time you can see cotton and corn grow ing luxuriently all over the mineral
 wealth. The Birmingham district has a
 larger area of coal than Great Britain
 as you will see by the following officia
 data:
 | Great Britain, 6195 square miles; Brit. | ish America, POO square miles, Ohio, 710( | square miles; Indiana, 6700 square miles | Tennessee, 3700 square miles; Georgia 17(
 s'~lare miles; Texas, 30c0 square miles
 Maryland, 555 square miles; Birmingham | district, S350 square miles.
 "Warrior coal field has 7S0o square miles, 50 seams of coal, 26 workable Ca haba coal field has 400 square miles, 2( seams of coal, workable Coosa coal field has 150 square miles. The three coal | fields contain in round numbers 10000 | 000,000 tons of coal, which will supply all | our railroads and one thousand furnaces making 150 tons per day each for 1O0l | years. If you wanted all this coal loaded In 30-ton cars, 1t would take 3,667, GOO, ,OoC cars. Couple those cars together they l track, or you could string them around the globe forty-one times. Allowing q | coal cars to a train, it would require 1S3,- | 000,000 locomotives to handle them. If | those trains passed our union depot every ten minutes 1t would take 3500 years for them to take this coal away.
 "If all this coal was out on the surface | 1t would make mountain $50 miles long by 300 feet high, with a Emile base. We | have today In this district 6000 coke | ovens yielding dealy 90O0 tons of coke, | which Is mostly used for furnace pur- | poses. In 1875 we had not a coke oven In | the State
 I've have in this district 27 blast fur naces, 26 of them in blast at the present | time, making 4OO0 tons per day of good | foundry iron, which at low market brings into the district s42,0OO per day; | this exclusive of the sale of coal which Is 1000 tons per day at $1 20 per ton l s20, AGO. making a total of s62 AGO coming | into this district daily. The sale of cot | ton in this district last season was sGo0,- l OOO making a grand total from coal, iron | and cotton SIS. GOO, 900 per year. | "We are sending out pig iron and cot ton to merry" England, Germany, France, Russia, Japan and China. We | are also sending our product from the | placid waters of the gulf to the stormy, | frozen lakes of the north, from the At | lantic to the Pacific, and from Green | lands icy mountains to India's corral | strand.
 | "You gentlemen of the north will soon | see your industries moving southward. | We have our great steels works wire and | rod mills at Ensley. our pipe works at | Bessemer and North Birmingham, two l rolling mills are in Birmingham and one at Bessemer.
 "We will soon have at Ensley the lar gest car works in America, where we can build all our cars for the transporta- ton of our coal and iron. We are great railroad center, having every facility for moving our product In fact we want for nothing thet can make a country pros- porous.
 Now, gentlemen, I have told you and shown you a great deal about this dis trict and when you will return to your homes across the Ohio river, you will be like the good old Queen, who was return ing from Solomon's temple, and when asked what she had seen and heard. Oh says she, they told me and showed me a great deal, but as it would have taken all my life to see 1t all I left "
 Colonel Johns speech was listened to with close attention, and was warmly ap- plauded
 Other Stops.
 From Ishkooda the party took quick run to Bessemer where half hour was spent in the pipe works.
 Ensley was next visited and the Clncin- natians marveled at the extent of the operations they witnessed at the great steel plant. They hadn't time to see the rod mill, but thep spent half hour at the furnaces, and, then, boarding the train, they returned to the city by the way of North Birmingham. stop at North Birmingham had been planned, but the excursionists being tired when they reached that point did not leave the cars.
 A bountiful lunch was served on the train. The visitors were profuse in their expressions of appreciation of Birming- hams hospitality and all agreed in say ing that the industrial activity of the dis trict far surpassed anything they had imagined of this section. They feel espe- cially grateful to MT. Tompkins and MT