The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-06-16

thicker, the men men are not more skill ful, the capital invested is not greater than in other competitive places, but the factor of having the material for iron making so closely concentrated in one spot gives the Bessemer region the ad- vantage that other iron making districts envy in vain. The assembling together at one point In the Birmingham district of the materials necessary for the manufac- ture of one ton of pig iron does not in volve the payment of more than 65 cents, which compares with minimum of s2 per ton in any other part of the country. Iron ore is carried from Minnesota to Plttsburg, fourteen hundred miles, of which one hundred and thirty is by rail and the rest by water The coke to meet 1t is brought from Connellsville, sixty five or seventy miles Conditions In Bes- semer are at their best, and the necessary outlay for freight at one of the furnace plants that could be named within two miles from the court house, does not ex- ceed 30 cents per ton if pig iron.
 The Best Ore.
 "The bed of iron ore on the south side of Jones valley, which furnishes nearly all of the furnaces Of the district, de- creases gradually in thickness from the eastern end of the valley to the western, but what it loses In thickness it more than gains in quality. The iron ore ae Bessemer is the best of any part of Red mountain and Is the only ore that has been found suitable for the manufacture of the basic iron. upon which depends the manufacture of steel in this district This Is because the ore al Bessemer con tains less silica than 1t contains at the East Birmingham end of the valley.
 TJ1 .F fIa r4t,r4 Fa ,ttf-A AR steel at Ensley by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company has been mo- torious. The rails manufactured there sold for more money than those manufactured by the old style Bessemer process. and it Is now declared by the Scientific American in it's issue of May IS that the open hearth process must take the place of the old style in the produc- ton of rails sufficiently low in phos- phorus to bear the stress and strain of modern railway traffic. It Is matter If congratulaton and pleasure in the entire district that Ensley should have been so prosperous as to have raised the value of what sold in 1897 for about, twenty thousand dollars at sheriff's sale to present real estate value of at least five million dollars A splendid increase in ten years. but 1t is only fair 10 point out that every ton of red iron ore used in Ensley is shipped there from Besse- mer, and the percentage of brown ore used for mixture comes from down the A. G. s. line through Bessemer
 In other words. Birmingham was .lo- cated where 1t is by civil engineers who had in view the growth of a town based upon the crossing of the A. c. s. and the l.. & N. railroads. If they had been metalurgical engineers gifted with pro phetic foresight and at the time of lo- eating Birmingham in 1871 had realized that in forty years there would be two million tons per annum of pig iron 70 be manufactured in the valley, they would certainly have located Birmingham where the city of Bessemer stands today and a steel works to be built today In Bessemer either by the Tennessee Coal. Iron and Railroad Company or any other corporation owning the raw material there could save from s1O0,O0O to sl5GOc0 per annum in transportation charges alone by paying freight only upon the coke instead of upon the ore. In a large modern furnace of today three tons of red ore are used for one ton of coke and experience has shown that 1t Is more profitable to carry one ton of coke to